The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday sidestepped Nike, Inc.’s appeal in a long-running sneaker design dispute with Adidas AG, declining to consider whether a tribunal can nix a patent based on grounds not raised by the parties. The justices passed over Nike’s claims that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board wrongly stripped it of a patent covering shoelace holes in knitted sneakers.
The intellectual property is at the center of a decade-long dispute between the footwear giants over whether Nike owned the method of creating knit sneakers without punching out holes for shoelaces.
According to Reuters, Adidas petitioned the patent office tribunal to cancel one of Nike’s patents related to making seamless knitted upper components for athletic sneakers in 2012. After the tribunal agreed to hear the case, Nike moved to cancel parts of its patent and substitute a less extensive patent claim. The board granted the cancellation request but denied its bid to amend the patent, citing earlier publications in the record that covered the same invention.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, specializing in patent cases, sent the case back to the board twice and rejected a third appeal by Nike last year. Nike told the Supreme Court in March that the board should not have been allowed to cancel a substitute patent element on its own accord based on arguments that Adidas had not raised at the time.
