Knitted footwear: Nike goes legal (again)
Sports group Nike has presented a new complaint against rival adidas over knitted textile uppers in shoes.
Through a law firm in Chicago, Nike filed papers to the US International Trade Commission in Washington DC on December 8, alleging that some adidas shoes infringe patents that Nike holds. It asked for a limited exclusion order on the shoes concerned and cease-and-desist orders against its rival.
It said its Flyknit technology for designing and manufacturing shoe uppers was the result of more than a decade of research and development. It has long accused adidas’s rival technology, Primeknit, of infringing its intellectual property.
In response, adidas has argued that knitted uppers are far from a new idea because the first constructions of this type were presented as early as 1940.
In previous iterations of this dispute, the Federal Patent Court in Munich has ruled that Nike’s European patent on knitting technology for footwear uppers, for which it filed at the time of the launch of its Flyknit idea in 2012, was obsolete.
This latest complaint focuses on US patents and of the presence in the US market of adidas Primeknit shoes.
