IP In Metaverse & Publicity Rights - Protecting Buildings and Sculptures

Intellectual Property rights have spanned as far as the human imagination can go and while we may reduce them to the traditional approach of logos, trademarks on commodities and colours and shapes, they can go as far as the designs of buildings, personality traits such as the voice of a celebrity and even find a place in our virtual avatars in the metaverse. In an interesting seminar conducted on behalf of ‘Anand and Anand’ all these figments of desires with regards to IP laws came alive on Monday.

The event saw Justice Pratibha M Singh of Delhi High Court as the keynote speaker and consisted of a two session panel discussion in which IP Laws in Metaverse were discussed in the first part and the Publicity rights and aspects of protection of Buildings and Sculptures were discussed in the later half.

Keynote Address Of Justice Pratibha M. Singh:

Justice Singh took the audience through the several changes that the IP laws in India underwent before they came to be in their current form. She put forth a capsule of where India was and how far it has come on its journey of innovation. 

In the early 90s the kind of IP litigation that High courts saw was very typical where a big brand owner and a small company owner would be in dispute and the parties would later settle but then the jurisprudence evolved beautifully. While earlier the litigation was between big companies and small establishments such as ones from daryaganj but as more and more domestic businesses started applying for trademarks the actual change started taking place as the local businesses realised the value of brand.

Hence the early 2000s were very crucial as new movies, music, cable operator related cases started coming up and then TRIPS came on the scene. Thereafter the internet became a huge phenomenon and fishing, spamming and domain name violation related cases started coming up.

First Session: IP In Metaverse

The first session dealing with the IP Laws in the metaverse was a one of its kind as the virtual avatars of the speakers came on the screen and conducted the session. While discussing the relation of intellectual property laws in concurrence with metaverse, the focus needs to be on the gradual development of trademarks and their current form.

There are several aspects of trademarks in metaverse and one of such aspects include NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens). The most basic meaning of an NFT is something which is unique and cannot be replaced as each NFT has a unique digital signature and they are different from cryptocurrencies as those can be traded or exchanged for one another.

The focus of the session came to be on several such cases that have been seen globally in relation to the intersection of IP laws and NFTs. These include:

1) Hermes v. Rothschild (Dealt with the IP rights of proprietors in metaverse)

2) Nike v. StockX (Dealt with a case where StockX made Nike’s sneaker designs and sold NFTs related to it)

The session dealt with other complex discussions including the commitment of meta to sustainability. Metaverse holds the potential to reduce carbon emissions as there will be a replacement of physical commodities by virtual products and experiences.

Second Session:Publicity Rights- Can buildings, sculptures etc also be protected?

As we delve deeper into several aspects of IP Laws, the topic of publicity rights cannot be left behind which is deeply related with personality rights as well. In this regard the case of Amitabh Bachhan  becomes very relevant where the bollywood actor had approached the Delhi High Court for the protection of his personality rights, his image, name and voice. Here he had alleged a violation of his publicity rights.

Another such case related to the case filed by the father of the late Sushant Singh Rajput where he sought a temporary injunction against the use of his son’s image for making a movie, caricature etc but the injunction was not granted.

Coming onto the aspect of protection and ownership of buildings, sculptures and their designs, the instance of Taj Hotel comes to mind where the image trademark to Mumbai’s Taj Hotel was granted. Another similar instance where Ismail building in Mumbai that houses a Zara Store was used in a webshow and gave rise to litigation due to the use of the building’s image without permission. Hence IP laws do extend to the protection of buildings and sculptures as well.