When ideas from different realms converge in a single moment of time, a new blog post is born.
“Catcalling” — albeit a rebranded, reimagined, or redefined version of it — recently has been front and center in a political Twitter storm and remains a lightning rod in the non-stop news
We’ve written on several occasions (for example, here, here, and here) about the aggressive policing by Adidas of its well-known “three-stripe” mark for shoes, including attempts to enforce its mark against other two-stripe or four-stripe designs (with some success).
Adidas is at it again, with a new lawsuit asserting trademark infringement
A little over a year ago, I pondered about whether anyone might be confused into believing Nike and Adidas had teamed up, given this shoe display:
After having spent a fair bit of time in various retail shoe stores with two of my boys over the weekend, I’m asking the same questions again, given
Knowing how Adidas (or should I say, adidas) jealously guards its three stripe design on shoes, and is notorious for protecting against not only three, but two and four stripe buffers as well, my eyes were drawn to this display of Nike Shox sport shoes at our local Finish Line retail store.
A purely hypothetical puzzle, but I’m wondering, would Christian Louboutin have a viable trademark claim if Yves Saint Laurent sold women’s shoes in boxes bearing the above seemingly random grid of letters, each letter having equal type, style, font, color and emphasis?
For those of you who answered with a strong “of course not,” I suspect your answer must change if selected highlighting is added in a way that emphasizes the LOUBOUTIN mark, makes it clearly legible, and causes it to visually “pop” from the letter grid, as shown below:
Here is the point. In Christian Louboutin’s current trademark infringement lawsuit against Yves Saint Laurent (asserting Louboutin’s lacquered red sole trademark for women’s high fashion designer footwear), it is important to appreciate that the allegedly infringing women’s shoes at issue are monochrome red in color, meaning the entire shoe is red, each and every portion, not just the sole (which is the extent of Louboutin’s registered non-traditional single color trademark), making it very difficult to argue that the allegedly infringing Yves Saint Laurent red sole does anything other than blend into the background of their entirely red-colored shoes.
In fact, I’m left wondering whether an average consumer would even discern Louboutin’s red sole mark in Yves Saint Laurent’s monochrome red high heel shoes, anymore than they would notice the LOUBOUTIN mark in the colorless letter grid at the top of this post, or whether they would more likely and simply see a harmless sea of letters and a harmless sea of red throughout the entire shoe.
Stay tuned for some more of my thoughts on Louboutin’s lacquered red sole trademark infringement claim against Yves Saint Laurent.
In the meantime, below the jump you’ll find a depiction of the same letter grid with more highlighted words that are relevant to the current trademark battle between Louboutin and Yves Saint Laurent.Continue Reading Louboutin Red: Blending Into the Background