NFTs, DIGITAL WORLDS AND BRAND PROTECTION IN FASHION
AN UK/ EUROPEAN INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PERSPECTIVE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54934/ijlcw.v2i3.54Keywords:
intellectual property, ip, fashion, designers, NFTs, metaverseAbstract
Two years into the metaverse utopia and with the promising launches of metaverse Fashion Weeks for two years in a row, the creative industries have not yet lost their enthusiasm for experimenting with digital worlds. Decentraland, Sandbox and Solana are just a few of the most well-known metaverse platforms, best understood as 3D virtual spaces, where online users can interact with each other in real time. At the same time, the world has witnessed several brands expanding their portfolios to digital goods for use in the metaverse and benefiting from exposure to an unpredicted, yet global marketing frontier. In practice, brand owners ‘mint’ non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, associated with their real-world or purely digital assets that most commonly enjoy intellectual property (IP) protections, such as fashion designs. Those can be sold at dedicated NFT marketplaces, but are often interoperable, or capable of being used across a number of different digital worlds. This Chapter endeavours to shed light into the following key question: to what extent intellectual property rights vested into real-world creations can be transposed into the digital and by extension, whether the legal protection offered can be given its full effect in a digital unregulated space, where users’ identities are anonymous or pseudonymous. Through the exploration of potential infringement instances in the metaverse and beyond, there comes the issue of effective legal enforcement. By weighing the expected benefits and losses from a UK & EU intellectual property perspective, the Chapter concludes: Are NFTs and the metaverse more than a gimmick? And hence, is the metaverse a market worth investing for fashion brands? The Chapter first explores the exciting new developments in the metaverse for fashion, as well as designers’ and brands’ activity in this novel market space, followed by an in-depth discussion on the intellectual property question posed.
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