Adidas cut the ties between itself and incredibly famous rapper Kanye West in relation to their partnership and their ‘Yeezy’ brand. Adidas declared that it will no longer manufacture Yeezy labelled products. However, Adidas has explicitly explained that it will continue to produce and sell trainers built on current Yeezy models but will remove the Yeezy trade mark on such future trainers. According to Adidas such activity is legal because it owns the sole design rights to existing, prior and new colourway Yeezy products.
As the specifics of the agreement between Adidas and Kanye are not public, this raises the question on whether other trainer manufacturers will legally be permitted to customise and produce the look and feel of the Adidas Yeezy without the Yeezy trade mark and whether this can be achieved without infringing Adidas’s IP rights? This will very much depend on whether such theoretical works would be considered as ‘expressive works’.
In the present trainer-obsessed culture, it is questioned how far trainer artists can force the boundaries of trainer design before someone’s artistic expression becomes IP infringement. For example when Vans sued MSCHF for designing and selling trainers in collaboration with famous rapper Tyga. The Court explained in this case that although the trainers have their similarities to the Vans shoe trade marks, they do not ‘sufficiently articulate an element of satire, ridicule, joking or amusement’ clearly indicating to the ordinary observer that MSCHF is ‘not connected in any way with Vans. Current IP laws provide some guidance but are not clear on where the appropriate line should be drawn.
While copyright does not protect beneficial products such as trainers, nevertheless Adidas successfully obtained two copyright registrations for design elements of their Yeezy trainers produced under their partnership with Kanye. Other artists may be able to use similar design elements of the Yeezy provided the new design significantly alters the original work, such that it adds something new with a further purpose of different components, changing the first with new expression, meaning or message.
By Zohaib Tahir, an LLM student at Solent University
