The famous Adidas three-stripe branding is not a valid trademark because it lacks a distinctive character, the European Court of Justice has ruled, in adidas AG v EUIPO (Case T-307/17)
Adidas had described the mark as consisting
of three parallel equidistant stripes of identical width, applied on the product in any direction. However, the court this week upheld the European Union Intellectual Property Office’s decision, noting ‘the mark is not a pattern mark composed
of a series of regularly repetitive elements, but an ordinary figurative mark’.
