K-Swiss fails to register five-stripe mark for shoes

In K-Swiss Inc v OHIM, the General Court has upheld a decision of the OHIM Second Board of Appeal refusing K-Swiss’s application for the registration of a figurative mark representing parallel stripes on a shoe. Among other things, the court held that the distinctive value of such signs may be explained less by their positioning on the product than by the intensive use which has been made of them on the market.