The Lego brick's studded, interlocking design was protected by patents. Patents expire, and these did, which is how competitors came to sell bricks that clutch onto Lego bricks perfectly well and are sold specifically on that compatibility. Lego then attempted to hold the same ground by a different route, registering the shape of the brick itself as a three-dimensional trademark.
That attempt failed, in Europe and elsewhere, for a reason that is worth understanding properly.
The IP move
Trademark law in many jurisdictions refuses registration to a shape whose features are necessary to obtain a technical result. The rationale is structural rather than hostile to any particular applicant. Patents grant a monopoly over function precisely because that monopoly is time-limited and is meant to end, releasing the technology to everyone. Trademarks, by contrast, renew indefinitely. Letting a functional shape in through the trademark door would convert an expired patent into a permanent one and defeat the bargain the patent system rests on.
European courts held that the studs and the clutch geometry were functional rather than decorative, and the registration did not survive. Courts elsewhere reached comparable conclusions on comparable facts, including in Canada.
Lego's real answer was to stop trying to own the geometry and to build a portfolio around everything the geometry did not cover: the brand name itself, the minifigure and its distinctive appearance, licensed universes carrying their own copyright and trademark layers, design registrations on newly introduced elements, and a continuous flow of new sets protected while they were new. A competitor can lawfully make a compatible brick. No competitor can make a Lego Star Wars set. The company stopped defending the commodity and started defending everything attached to it.
The takeaways
Each protection type has a job. Using one to do another's work usually fails, and it usually fails late and publicly.
Every patent has an expiry date built into it from the day it is granted, so the real portfolio question is what protects the business the day after.
Function belongs in patents, identity in trademarks, appearance in designs, and expression in copyright.
The most durable positions layer several different rights over the same product rather than betting the business on one.
When a core right expires, the strategy that replaces it has to be built years earlier, not improvised afterwards.
The lesson for your business
Plan the portfolio on a timeline rather than accumulating it as a pile. Know when each right expires, what specifically it is protecting, and what will carry the value once it lapses. Match the instrument to the asset from the beginning, because a functional advantage protected only by a patent has a countdown attached to it. A company that first asks this question in the year its core patent runs out is already several years late to its own answer.
