A luxury fashion house that is deeply embedded in the arts needed to understand how rampant the fakes of its products were in the metaverse and to systematically address digital counterfeiting. The fashion house came to Jayaram to ensure its place in digital commerce.
In the luxury market, quality in physical and digital products is imperative to maintain a gold standard reputation. One of the biggest and most iconic fashion houses in the world has deep experience in dealing with product counterfeiting and trademark and copyright infringement IRL. But in the digital world? The fashion house knew that it needed to weed out the fakes, but it didn’t know the extent of the problem or how to address it. It needed a legal team with Web3 expertise to counsel them on IP issues related to the minting and issuance of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), protection of famous marks on the blockchain, and fair use context, as well as with connections to the latest tech to sleuth the digital world.
The fashion house has a longstanding practice of collaborating with artists and cultural needle-movers to augment the brand’s relationship to arts and culture at-large. So, in concert with the client’s in-house team, we partnered closely to create a strategy to police its marks on the Internet and emerging Web3 environments without sacrificing the integrity of the brand or its reputation amongst contemporary artists.
We quickly employed cutting edge technology, found within our broad network of tech savvy partners, to identify extraordinary amounts of copyright and trademark infringement occurring on various platforms, including OpenSea and others. We analyzed countless images for fair use and other potential defenses. We designed and executed targeted tactics to strategically and quickly enforce our clients’ IP rights against many creators who were using the client’s marks without consent.
Within just a few weeks, Jayaram cleared the path for the client through addressing dozens of infringements, and collaborated with the client on its strategy for the Web3 world to enable the continued protection of its global multi-billion dollar brand.
The client continues to work with Jayaram on IP licensing, artist commissions, and IP enforcement matters across the board.