Source: U.S. Customs and Border Patrol / CBP
Bootleggers beware, Nike and Converse are finally getting off the couch and taking legal action to ensure thou shall not bubble booties.
Footwear News is reporting that Nike Inc. and Converse Inc. have filed a sweeping lawsuit against a whopping 589 websites and 676 social media accounts who they feel are selling counterfeit kicks and passing them off as official Nike and Converse merchandise.
About. Damn. Time.
The sneaker brands filed their lawsuit on Tuesday (January 12) in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in which they claimed that the defendants were infringing on their brands and trying to bank off counterfeit products bearing their well-known names and logos.
“Each of defendants’ 589 infringing websites … is currently, or was within the past twelve months, advertising, offering to sell, and/or selling counterfeit Nike or Converse products to United States consumers,” the complaint reads, adding that the defendants are operating “a counterfeit scheme” via 42 separate networks based in China, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain as well as other foreign jurisdictions.
“To ensure that consumers make the association between defendants’ counterfeit products and the genuine Nike Products from which they were copied, defendants not only copy the designs, patterns and color schemes associated with [Nike and Converse] products, but also expressly identify the counterfeit products as ‘Nike’ or ‘Converse’ products,” the lawsuit states. “Further, defendants make unauthorized use of plaintiffs’ marks, including the trademark-protected ‘Nike’ and ‘Converse’ names, throughout the infringing websites and infringing social media on which these goods are advertised or offered for sale to consumers in the United States and this District.”
Though Nike has taken legal action in prior years to protect their brand from bootleggers, recently they’ve taken it up a notch and have even come for customizers such as Warren Lotas for infringing on their classic silhouettes.
Still we’re not mad at this as many a sneakerhead have found themselves accidentally copping a pair of bootlegs due to the ever-improving production of non-authorized Nikes and Jordans. That being said if you copped bootleg Converse than that’s on you cause we’ve never heard anyone complain about that.
Just sayin.’
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