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Taken from cointelegraph.com | Author: Luke Huigsloot
IP rights will continue to be an area of conflict within Web3 and NFTs, but there’s no easy solution, lawyers told Cointelegraph.
Intellectual property (IP) rights will continue to be a growing area of tension within Web3 and nonfungible tokens (NFTs), as IP rights often rely on a single “identifiable entity,” while Web3 is more often decentralized.
Speaking to Cointelegraph, David Kappos, a partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, said that IP is traditionally “owned by an identifiable entity, which makes it necessarily centralized from a legal viewpoint.”
Kappos suggested that the tension between IP and decentralization does not have a clear solution, asking “how does a DAO really own the IP of the protocol it is supposed to govern?”
Over the last year, there have been several lawsuits against NFT projects alleged to be violating IP, copyright and trademarks.
When asked about third parties creating digital artworks or wearables of branded products, Kappos suggested that “an unlicensed implementer in a Web3 environment should refrain from creating a wearable that is confusingly similar to a brand owned by a third party — the same as in the real world.”