[ad_1]
The Faux Pass of the 2022 fashion season is the failure to understand the metaverse and its potential impact on the fashion industry and popular brands.
Metaverse is a concept popularized (not owned) by Facebook’s name change to Meta. Metaverse presents a wide range of issues affecting all aspects of fashion brands, especially intellectual property concerns. The global pandemic has accelerated a social shift and proven the need for an increased online presence, where avatars will be as fashionable as possible and wear high-end brands like Gucci while walking a virtual runway. Check out Metaverse Fashion Week in Decentraland. While it creates great opportunities for brand owners, this new way of interacting with consumers also presents challenges that must be understood by the fashion industry in general, and especially by the owners of the world’s most coveted brands.
Welcome to the metaverse
Metaverse is a new version of a virtual reality space. In the metaverse, users, through their digital avatars, interact with a computer-generated environment and can meet, socialize, shop, and play. Metaverses promise a virtual life unfettered by the boundaries of reality. The Metaverse is different from previous iterations of virtual reality; it has more advanced graphics, uses non-volatile tokens (NFTs) and includes decentralization.
Decentralization, in the context of the metaverse, means peer-to-peer user transactions that do not rely on an intermediary to carry out those transactions. The latest technology available has resulted in more realistic avatars in the metaverse, which is creating a need for more fully equipped avatars. The advent of NFTs has made it possible for your avatars to own unique items of clothing and accessories. No one wants to be underdressed or under-accessorized in the metaverse.
NFT in the fashion industry
NFTs are digital tokens of some kind that exist on a blockchain and are linked to physical or digital assets. In essence, ownership of an NFT is ownership of the code stored in a verified ledger that stores previous ownership information. The verified ledger can be used to facilitate an easier process (via smart contracts) for providing royalty payments to original creators. Ownership of an NFT generally does not include ownership of any related intellectual property. Instead, intellectual property is used to identify the underlying code that is owned.
In the virtual fashion industry, NFTs are the high fashion of the metaverse. NFTs allow infinitely reproducible digital goods to be purchased as if they were one of a kind. This creates the basis for a number of issues related to NFTs, including trademark and copyright concerns for brand owners and the licensing of these rights.
A high-profile case involving the famous Hermès Birkin bag has already been filed. Enter the Metabirkin, an NFT version of the famous Hermès Birkin bag that is in no way related to Hermès and for which sales of up to US$46,000 per Metabirkin have been claimed. The existence of Metabirkin bags and other virtual goods presents a host of intellectual property issues that will need to be addressed by the courts.
Brand owners must prepare for the digital future
According to Forbes, assuming the metaverse is a future iteration of the internet, the metaverse could be a trillion dollar revenue opportunity. As such, brand owners in the fashion industry must consider if, how, and when to become active in the metaverse. Before doing so, and especially for entities considering NFT-based offerings or other commercial aspects of the metaverse, brand owners should take steps to ensure their intellectual property portfolio is in order. This includes reviewing existing trademark and copyright filings to confirm that strong trademark protection exists, as well as considering additional trademark and copyright filings that specifically cover uses in the metaverse .
Additionally, brand owners should be prepared to consider how they may need to enforce their intellectual property rights in the metaverse in the near future. Such enforcement strategies must consider how brand owners will interact with third parties using the proprietary brands. The collaborative and decentralized nature of the metaverse creates unique problems from an implementation perspective. For example, the typical online takedown request is not feasible on a decentralized platform without a controlling webhost.
There is a lot of uncertainty surrounding the metaverse. “How will it be used?” and “How will intellectual property law be enforced?” are common questions. But it’s clear that brand owners need to immediately start thinking about these issues and develop strategies to move forward in the metaverse. This is an opportunity to expand the reach of their brands in exciting new ways, and careful brand owners will begin discussions with their IP attorneys to ensure that each brand is prepared to enter the metaverse in time. of her choice, rather than being undeniably delayed.
[ad_2]
Source link