How should digital assets be treated in terms of property? This is what the Law Commission of England and Wales has been considering in its consultation paper paper on the recognition and protection of digital assets which is open for responses until 4 November 2022. The consultation paper recommends law reform to recognise a third … Read more

The creation ("minting") and sale and use of NFTs raises many IP issues which we have discussed in our previous posts in our IP in NFTs series. However, brand owners and product manufacturers must also be vigilant in monitoring the virtual marketplaces to ensure that third parties are not creating NFTs that infringe their own IP rights.  This is especially true where the company is considering releasing or has released NFTs, because the public will begin to associate the brand with NFTs (which could include infringing NFTs).  There are several strategies that companies could adopt to minimise this risk. Read more

Creating an NFT can give rise to other IP issues, aside from questions of transfer of rights. In particular there is the issue of who in fact has the right to create and release NFTs and whether the NFT infringes third party rights. In this third of our series of NFT IP blog posts, we deal with "minting", ie the creation and sale of NFTs. Read more

As we reported in our first blog post in this series, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a new asset class that is being adopted eagerly across all sectors, raising some interesting challenges from an IP perspective. While NFTs have demonstrated themselves to be a powerful tool in the new digital era, they remain poorly understood, in particular in relation to the rights that are (or are not) transferred on purchase of an NFT. Releasing (known as "minting") and purchasing NFTs can give rise to a number of IP-related issues, such as: - Who has the right to create and release NFTs? - Does the NFT infringe third party rights? - What rights are transferred with the NFT (and on resale)? - How this rights transfer is achieved? Read more

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are one of the hottest IP topics currently. NFTs can be used simply for marketing purposes or as a new form of asset to attract investment or as part of the transfer of products and services into the Metaverse.This new asset class has exploded across all sectors and raises some interesting challenges from an IP perspective. While NFTs have demonstrated themselves to be a powerful tool in the new digital era, they remain poorly understood. In our series of blog posts on NFTs, we explore intellectual property considerations, misconceptions and issues that we are seeing arising in the NFT space, including, in this first blog post, clarifying what NFTs are and how they can create effective control over digital assets and the use of NFTs for provenance and anti-counterfeiting. Read more

The China State Administration for Market Regulation has published a Regulation on Prohibition for Abuse of Intellectual Property Rights to Exclude or Restrict Competition (Draft for Comment), which is now open to the public for comments.  The Regulation reflects the latest approach of the China authorities to the relationship between competition law and intellectual property enforcement, which has been a topic of concern for a long time, and includes clarification on scenarios that will be deemed abuses of market dominance in relation to SEP licensing. Read more

The Supreme People’s Court of China (Supreme Court) released the Interpretation (“Interpretation”) of the Supreme Court on Several Issues Concerning the Application of the Law of the People’s Republic of China against Unfair Competition (“AUCL”), which was effective on March 20, 2022. The Interpretation consists of 29 clauses in total, and, based on the revised … Read more

The EU General Court has overturned EUIPO and Board of Appeal decisions, ruling that the shape of a lipstick may be registered as a 3D trade mark insofar as it represents a memorable shape that will be perceived by the relevant public as one that departs significantly from the norms and customs of the cosmetics sector. Read more