Adidas v. Payless ShoeSource
adidas America, Inc. v. Payless ShoeSource, Inc. · 2008 · D. Or.
What happened
Adidas sued over footwear carrying two and four parallel stripes, alleging they infringed and diluted its registered three-stripe mark. The dispute ran for years and covered a large number of shoe styles.
The money
A jury returned a verdict of roughly $305 million; the case was subsequently resolved and the final sum paid was not the verdict figure.
Reported figures in trademark cases frequently conflate what was sought, what a jury awarded, what survived appeal, and what was actually paid — which is often confidential. Confirm against the docket or a primary source before relying on this number.
What it means for your business
A design element can be the trademark. Adidas did not own "stripes" in the abstract, but it did own a specific, long-used and heavily promoted stripe configuration, and near-miss variations were still found to infringe. If your differentiation from a competitor is "we used a slightly different number of them", that is not differentiation.