Adidas, the brand with (two) or three stripes.

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) recently ruled in favor of Adidas following its opposition to an application for registration of a Community trademark filed by Shoe Branding Europe.

Shoe Branding Europe has filed an application to register a trademark featuring two stripes, which has been opposed by the well-known German shoe manufacturer.

Initially, the opposition was rejected by both the Opposition Division of the OHIM and the Board of Appeal, both of which held that the Adidas three-stripe mark was entitled to protection only against identical or similar imitations and that, in the case at hand, there were sufficient differences to rule out any likelihood of confusion on the part of the public (in particular, the number of stripes, their angle, and their position). Adidas successfully appealed to the General Court, which held that the Board had erred in finding that the marks were different from one another and that, since Adidas was well known for its three parallel stripes mark, this was sufficient to establish a likelihood of confusion on the part of the public and a case of trademark infringement.

Shoe Branding appealed to the CJEU, which upheld the General Court’s decision in its entirety, stating that the differences between the two trademarks were of little significance and that “the difference between two and three stripes depicted on a shoe is not sufficient to undermine the similarities arising from the representation of the signs in question and their position on the side of the shoe.” The CJEU held that the slight differences between the trademarks in question were not such as to attract the attention of an average consumer or to influence the overall impression produced by the trademarks, given the presence on the market of numerous slanted stripes on the side of a shoe.