Carolyn Wimbly Martin Presents for Strafford’s Webinar on Digital Fashion and Brand Protection

Carolyn Wimbly Martin was one of four faculty members for a Strafford Webinar on Digital Fashion and Brand Protection: Leveraging Copyright, Trademark, and Trade Dress; NFTs; Ownership Challenges. The panelists agreed that, while the future of the metaverse remains undefined, now is the time to experiment in this marketplace consistent with each organization’s brand objectives. Clients should be counseled to follow time-tested best practices for intellectual property protection, including trademark registrations, monitoring of possible infringements, implementation of effective notice and take down procedures and legal action where necessary in the virtual world. Three key cases to monitor which will likely have an impact in both the physical and virtual world include The Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (transformative fair use), Nike v. StockX and Hermes v. Rothschild (trademark infringement in the metaverse). There is also a potential joint study of NFTs’ impact on intellectual property rights by the Copyright Office and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) within the next year with comments to be solicited from interested parties.

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