Wednesday, February 7, 2018

Cubes and Lawyers Part 2: Countersuit!

This is just a followup to one of the items in a previous post about legal action by Rubik's Brand, Ltd.

In response to aggressive action by Rubik's, TheCubicle has put together a countersuit. Here's the explanation from Phil from TheCubicle, from his post on reddit.com/r/cubers :

Hi Everyone,
This is Phil from TheCubicle. I'm posting here to give everyone an update on the legal situation with Rubik's Brand Limited.
On Friday, February 2, Cubicle Enterprises LLC has filed a lawsuit against Rubik’s Brand Limited seeking cancellation of four of its trademarks on the basis of utilitarian functionality, genericness, and fraud, as well as treble damages for various antitrust violations related to trademark misuse and attempted and actual monopolization. The suit also requests a declaratory judgment that TheCubicle has not violated Rubik’s purported federal and state trademark rights.
This controversy first arose in October 2017, when Rubik’s sued TheCubicle for trademark infringement, threatening to shut down its business and strip away its assets, effectively destroying the livelihoods of our employees and their ability to serve the community. A line of dialogue with Rubik’s was quickly opened in hopes of resolving the dispute productively and amicably. However, the painstakingly frustrating negotiations that followed made it clear that Rubik’s legal claims were unsubstantiated and dealing with Rubik’s was impossible.
It has also become clear that Rubik’s wants complete control of speedcubing and is willing to resort to bullying, intimidation, abuse of intellectual property law, and monopolistic tactics, including illegal tying activities, in its attempt to get it. We will not allow this to happen.
Rubik’s fails to see that our community is built on the bonds of friendship, trust, and the spirit of fair play. We grow together as cubers and people, and this is what makes our community special.
Our world of sharing ideas, helping each other as friends, and competing at our best under fair rules with our favorite cube products from sources chosen by cubers is something that should never be tainted by Rubik’s voracious greed to control and dominate.
We will not allow Rubik’s to leverage its invalid intellectual property, monopolistic demands, and other threats against its competitors to oppress us or limit the opportunities for expanding cubing, both for competitors and fans. We will not allow its attempt at perpetuating a monopoly to be successful. And, we will not allow the shadow of Rubik’s to loom over us anymore.
For these reasons, we took action in Federal court to stop Rubik’s from threatening our company and the survival of its business operations, our community, and the market.
We cannot thank our community enough for its support and understanding. The past few months have been extremely challenging, and we are beyond appreciative of the overwhelming support and expressions of solidarity from everyone around us.
We tried to settle this on reasonable terms with Rubik’s, but it became apparent that Rubik’s was not bargaining in good faith and that it was necessary to protect our community through this litigation. We are confident in the strength of our legal claims against Rubik’s, and will continue to do our best in this difficult situation. We look forward to representing the cubing community’s interests.

Also just recently, the Rubik's Brand/Red Bull tournament has announced their first event. This tournament would be the first of its kind after Rubik's failed attempt to reach some sort of agreement with the WCA. Several other dates in other locations have been planned. Similarly to TheCubicle, the WCA was not amenable to what they perceived as strongarm tacticts to take over competitive cubing and chose not to work with Rubik's and Red Bull on these events.

Saturday, January 27, 2018

I disassemble things so you don't have to.

At a recent gig, I was solving my big 12cm Paladone cube. It's fun at night because it lights up, and it's less obvious on stage than leaving a flashlight up there. But, the cube is made mostly of acrylic, so perhaps I should have been more gentle trying to get through solves. Thankfully it was after the musical portion of the evening and while my drummer was packing up, because that meant only a couple of people saw the giant cube self-destruct. One of the spindle posts sheared off, and the entire layer of the cube that was being held in by that center piece tumbled to the cobblestone. Thankfully no small internal pieces went missing (except perhaps a nylon washer).

Today, I'm working on reassembly, so I thought it might be fun to show off the inside because I don't plan to have it apart often.

Here's the post that I had to cement back on. You can see a little of the the circuit board inside where the LED's that light up the interior of the cube are.

Here's the non-WCA compliant logo on one of the corners.

And here are the sub-parts of the center piece.

When the post finishes drying in a couple of hours, I can slide the lower part of the center on, re-seat the spring, lube and install the swivel ring, screw the retaining screw back in, and snap the center cap back on. There's a chance it's going to shear apart again, but I may also have a different glue formulation available if for some reason this one doesn't work out. I may also have to add a plastic washer

On another personal cubing note, I improved my best time on 6x6x6 by an entire minute, but going from 11:36.24 to 10:33.54 doesn't seem like much when the record time for a 6x6x6 is 1:20.03 (Feliks Zemdegs, AUS) and USA's own Max Park is closing in on him, having beaten Kevin Hays' best single by almost 5 seconds to take the #2 spot.

Here's Max's recent WR average that includes a 1:21.31 single.



POSTSCRIPT: Sometime while this was going up, Max Park broke the 6x6x6 single record.