IP in the metaverse - Same, same but different?

Charlie Bond: So good morning. Thanks very much for coming to this Leeds Digital Festival Webinar on IP in Metaverse. The session is going to last about 45 minutes with the final five to ten hopefully set aside for questions. Can you ask the questions at any time and they will go into the Q&A function and then we can pick them up at the end and if we have run out of time, then after the session we will try and pick them up, provided they are asked not anonymously.

We are also recording the webinar and that together with the transcript will go on our website afterwards and the slides will be sent out.

To explain who I am, my name is Charlie Bond. I am a Principal Associate in the Gowling WLG IP Team. My practice spans all IP rights, but generally, I focus a bit more on the brand side of things.

Lucy Singer: Hi. I am Lucy Singer. I am also an Associate in the IP Team. I have worked across a number of IP rights also, but I am currently focusing in on the world at brands and advertising.

Charlie: So this is what we are going to cover today. We are going to start with terminology. You are probably aware that there is lots of jargon associated with the Metaverse, so we are going to go through some of the basics of that. Some of you will be familiar with the words that we are going to cover. Others will not, but the intention is that then we are all on an equal playing field for later discussions.

Then we are going to talk about how the Metaverse has developed. So we will move on to talking about consensually what the Metaverse is because that is quite important. Then we will look at how it will or may work as well as where it has or indeed has not actually got to and then we are going to finish up looking at IP rights of the Metaverse. Taking a high level look at the different IP rights and then because it is the most important at the moment, we would look at what brand owners need to be thinking about to ensure they are protecting enforcing their rights within the Metaverse. So without further ado, we shall board this Gowling WLG Leeds Digital Festival Space Ship and launch ourselves into the Metaverse.

Lucy: Thanks Charlie. So as Charlie briefly touched upon there. There are a lot of buzzwords, which concern the Metaverse and we are just going to spend a few minutes kind of clarifying some of the main terms.

So Blockchain. Blockchain is hopefully a bit more familiar by now and in essence, Blockchain is a technology that permanently records transactions and it does so in a public database known as a ledger. The technology allows the same data to be stored globally over thousands of computers, without the need of a trusted authority or essential server. Any network user is then able to see all the entries that appear at any time in a public Blockchain. So obviously some Blockchains can be private. Blockchain technology is therefore really useful because it is a proven, approved and robust method of tracking anything involving transactions or ownership.

The core aspect of Blockchain is therefore the dissentialisation of it, resulting in the fact that there is no vulnerable point of control, which makes the network really difficult to gain control of or easy to fool. So as we might discuss later, the Metaverse will not be built by a single company in its ideal form, but instead conceived by a multiple network. The dissentialisation aspect of Blockchain therefore makes it really vital in allowing proof of ownership across these numerous worlds. Users without it would have little incentive to purchase digital assets and so Blockchain will, if it goes forward, play an essential role in enabling the Metaverse to become a reality.

In similar vain, Crypto Currency. So Crypto Currency is the implementation of Blockchain for the purposes of currency, using the technology to track transactions made in the currency. The currency therefore takes advantage of the dissentialisation and transparency of the Blockchain is perhaps more of a famous or lucrative or ruinous forms of blocked in Blockchain depending on your perspective. The most well-known of these is obviously Bitcoin, but now there are numerable others.

It is speculated that Crypto Currencies will be used widely across the Metaverse for the same reason as Blockchain, so their dissentialisation enables consistency across the different worlds and their security makes them ideal for the job.

There are obviously numerous Crypto Currencies and I have just touched upon. Some more volatile. Some more legitimate. So it is entirely possible that we might see the rise of a kind of single Crypto Currency to manage the Metaverse.

Charlie: So NFTs. NFTs stands for Non-Fungible Token. An NFT is a digital token that is transferrable between two people but unlike other digital assets, they are not interchangeable. So you need to think of them as sort of Crypto Picasso's rather than Crypto Pounds, but like Crypto Currency, each NFT is issued or minted and its ownership tracked and verified using Blockchain. So NFTs are essentially just Metadata files that refer to a digital version of a particular work of art or any other asset, which is then stored on a Blockchain.

Lots of people think that they might provide a bridge between real and virtual property and allow people to prove ownership of a virtual good, which they can then use to display on, for example, their digital avatar in the Metaverse. We are going to come on to avatars in a second.

NFT is also to create scarcity in the digital world as they by definition cannot be duplicated, but it is worth noting that the asset and the underlining of NFT certainly can. I am sure lots of you have seen loads of headlines about how much NFT can have an effect on the open market. In 2021, so a couple of years now, Damian Hurst made some artworks in both NFT and physical form. The buyers had to choose which one they wanted and then the other was a destroyed. So there is a lot of scepticism about the value of some NFTs, but that did represent creating true valley because you ended up with a genuinely unique artwork at the end of it. So NFTs, they are not a perfect solution to ownership of goods. People think that transferring an NFT will also transfer ownership of the underlying artwork, but that is not necessarily the case. All that NFT is, is a unit of data stored on a Blockchain. It is an on-chain asset in the Metaverse, different from an off-chain asset in the real world. There is no legal basis to say that transferring the on-chain asset also then transfers the legal rights to the underlying off-chain asset. Instead when the legal ownership transferred is basically dictated by what is contained in the written t's & c's that made the NFT, which itself only works if that person actually had the necessary rights to the underlying artwork in the first place. So you need a contract that describes exactly what the legal effects of transferring the NFT is.

A good example of this is the Crypto Pounds in NFTs, which are on the slide. They attempted to retroactively add copyright licences having already sold tonnes of artworks in NFT form. You cannot really do that and it is a real problem with people just firing out NFTs without actually thinking about the underlying issues and what they are transferring.

Lucy: So now just moving on to Avatars. An Avatar is the manifestation of a user within the Metaverse. As you can see from the pictures on the right, I think more this delightful than not remotely frightening image of Mark Zuckerberg and not the species from James Cameron 3D films. So it is a personalisation of these Avatars which commentators believe will drive the consumer spending within the Metaverse. Micro transactions within the Metaverse will likely centre around the kind of provisions of goods and services for Avatar. So we are already seeing numerous brands take part in this, Nike, Van and Ralph Lauren all created row blocks experiences offering the ability to purchase digital clothing and the different assets and accessories which you can then put on your Avatar. Obviously, in some respects, this is a bit of an easy win for fashion brands because they do not need to create the physical versions for consumers to purchase them.

Charlie: So AR verses VR. AR and VR are both obviously really important acronyms when it comes to Metaverse, but they are often used wrongly or interchangeably when they are actually completely different. AR stands for all Augmented Reality. That is where users interact with the real world in some form, so there are lots of popular AR games and platforms because the technological needs for people to use AR are much less than they are for VR, so I am sure a lot of us play Pokéman Go. That is a game where all people need is their phone and it does not require any extra technology. All you do is click on the AR feature, which superimposes your interactions with Pokémon onto the real world via the camera on your phone. So if I am walking up to a post box and I hold up my phone with the AR function on, there might be a Pokémon hiding behind that post box. It made the news for the wrong reasons where they launched Pokéman Go because you might remember the people were chasing Pokémon into the road, just looking at their phones and not looking at what was going on around them, which is a thing the developers then had to fix quite quickly.

VR, that stands for Virtual Reality. VR is how the Metaverse is more being framed, so users exist in entirely creative fantastical video game style world, but it is limited by headsets and hardware you need to use it, which is still at a reasonably basic stage with a lower than expected uptake really as well. That is despite the fact that the current generation of VR headsets have been around for about a decade now, but there may be things like Apple's Vision Headset, which is coming soon, which implements AR technology as well as VR will change things. We are probably sceptical about whether it will.

Lucy: So now we are going to move on and discuss what the Met averse is now and what it might be later. So just moving into the concept days and perhaps its more current state.

The first reference to the Metaverse was in the Cyberpunk book, Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson. The idea being that it was an alternate immersive 3D reality, where your life could be duplicated in a digital universal. Facebook, now Meta, then brought it into the public Lexicon in 2021, when they pitched their idea of this inter-relatable interactive Metaverse, where you could socialise free of constraint to the physical world. The Metaverse is a concept therefore in Meta's vision as defined by kind of two main features. So the first being that it does not identify single virtual space, but it is centralised across various platforms and accessible throughout them.

The second is that it exists in parallel to our current world, so there is an interactable version with our physical lives. As Charlie just touched upon, nothing like this currently exists and even if it were to exist, it is quite interesting to think about some of the legal challenges, such as position, so if you think about how work in terms of going across numerous platforms, currently we have a separate contract with each of the platforms we log on to and use as users. If there is one massive Metaverse, who do we sign the contract with? How will the various platforms with both big players and small players counteract and when you think of some of those big characters that are currently in the technology space, and thinking of the kind of Elon Musk' s of this world, it is interesting to see how that might play out.

So in the reality, as we speak now, the current existence of Metaverse is perhaps much more common in gaming. So, currently we have got games like Essential Land and the Sandbox and there core these are quite basic traditional video games, with Blockchain technology underlying them. So, for instance, they might have background systems, where users can vote for and against updates. There might be virtual currency, there might be virtual ownership, but really what distinguishes these kind of games from the Metaverse as it was envisaged by Meta, if it is the social element, games like that have existed for decades. Back in my day, it was Abu Hotel, if we have any fans in the room?

If it is a Blockchain element, again, games have existed with Virtual Currencies for decades. Also these games in their current form have no connection at the moment in the real world and as Charlie just touched upon then, the kind of physical hardware we need does not yet really exist, so if we are talking about connected headsets, they obviously need very powerful computers to be connected to, which is quite funky and the more wireless headsets that we see available on the market at the moment have their own issues with kind of tracking delays and range of motion.

Charlie: Also now we get to the future of the Metaverse, starting by looking at its rise. So when it first launched obviously there was lots of attention and investment in the Metaverse and it is now to be sceptical where ultimately still people are suggesting that the Metaverse exist now in its complete anticipated form. There has been tonnes of investment. Facebook obviously changed its name to Meta in 2021 and spent about £10 billion acquiring different Metaverse orientated VR software and hardware. Lots of places have made estimates about what they think the worth of a Metaverse market will be, so we have got William Burgess of £800 billion by next year. JP Morgan £1 trillion, Gordon Sacks £8 trillion and a study earlier this year, by Newman Kingsley, thought it would be worth £5 trillion by 2030. That spectrum sort of indicates how in the dark we really are about where everything is now or where it is going to go.

There has been strides in VR technology because of the investment in the Metaverse. Meta launched its project camera heads last year, which contract your face and head movements and then can be mapped on to your digital Avatar, the barrier there being the price, which was $1,500 at launch and then this month, Apples have announce it is going to launch its Apple Vision Pro-Headsets next year in the US, which will be specifically tailored for the Metaverse Ecosystem they say, which again will retail at an eye watering $3,500.

On the consumer side, trade in Virtual Metaverse goods and even retail estate is already long established. Looking at real estate, every realm, which describes itself as additional real estate company since 2022, it purchased about $4.3 million of digital real estate in the Sandbox.

Looking at marketplaces, the essential land similarly has its own marketplace, where users can buy and sell virtual items as well as real estate. Big brands like Samsung, Adidas, PWC a like, they have all shown willingness to purchase land in the Essential Land.

Gucci did something novel. They had a virtual future garden space on row blocks and then opened a physical space that matched it as the same time, so you could have a sort, of or they call it an immersive multi-media experience, where you went between the Metaverse and the real world. And then events and concerts, Sotheby's have hosted an auction. They are in concerts by people like Dead Mouse and Grimes and then fashion events by big brands like Dolce & Gabbana and Tommy Hilfiger all hosted on these platforms.

So the flip side on the future, despite all the positive things we have just talked about that have happened, you have probably noticed that the Metaverse has taken quite a few hits particularly this year.

Microsoft shut its virtual workspace platform AltSpaceVR in January. They let go of 100 members of their Metaverse team and made a lot of cuts to their Pro Headset Team. All in March, Disney shut its Metaverse division. Walmart ended its row block Metaverse project and Meta declared they were going to focus much more on AI and building down into every one of their products.

Just mentioning AI, we are not going to go into detail on it because there is a whole other topic in itself. I am sure lots of you have attended lots of entire talks at this Festival on AI, but obviously it does have a relevance to the Metaverse and essentially will just amplify the issues that we are already talking about anyway.

So on balance even if the Metaverse has experienced a few setbacks lately and it does not exist as people thought it might at this point, there is still a push to progress and accelerate its progress. People are familiar with the new principles that underlie the commerce in the Metaverse because as we have said, they have been around for years and the technology is getting there. What remains not there is the underlying system that joins all the elements together into one seamless global Metaverse package.

Lucy: So we are now just going to quickly discuss some of the pros and cons of the Metaverse as envisaged. I will be your bearer of good news and the discuss some of the positives. So in terms of social obviously currently interaction on-line is generally on social media or video chats which are 2D. The Metaverse envisages a kind of situation where you could for instance take your other half on a date to the cinema without leaving the house or you could have your friends round for a virtual takeaway. I do not know what that would consist of in a virtual replica of your living room and in terms of businesses, obviously, Virtual offers platforms could simulate the office environment with meeting seemingly face to face in a post-Covid world. This offers quite an interesting spectre.

Retail outlets obviously, as we will touch upon later, have a big interaction with the Metaverse, so advertisers could browse house to High Street shops and purchase both virtually in a digital world and then have a physical counterpart sent home. In terms of brands and advertising, just as in the physical world the Metaverse could provide a real myriad of opportunities, so from the branded clothes, the advertisers could be wearing to a kind of virtual billboards that you might see.

Speaking of real estate, virtual tours are kind of already taking place as you might see on real estate companies, but the Metaverse could allow this to take a whole new level, so imagine kind of touring round a potential purchase that you wanted to look at, you could stroll down the local High Street. You could sit in the garden and obviously enables a whole load of possibilities and finally education and tourism, so obviously restrictions would not occur in the Metaverse. So theoretically, you could visit a digital replica from anywhere from anywhere. So for example, you could take a trip to ancient mine ruins in Mexico or in terms of schooling, you could walk across the volcanic lava field all whilst sitting in your classroom or your bedroom.

Charlie: So to the pitfalls. It could be argued that] a lot to the elements the Metaverse already exists and often in more than a basic form. Lots of these do not require a unified persistent Metaverse as people envision and as robo-Zuckerberg thinks. At their core discreet experiences like touring a house and VR theme park or a virtual business meeting, they do not need a persistent Avatar or an economy to work. They work independently and they are already widely adopted without the Metaverse label or any persistency, but they are not yet widely adopted as one single package. Components of the Metaverse think of that simply because VR technology has not been widely adopted rather than actually looking at whether there is a lack of demand for it.

The other issue is on the slide that we will go through to privacy. Obviously there are existing concerns surrounding privacy and tracking on-line and they are only going to be made worse by the Metaverse as technology becomes more sophisticated so do the opportunities for marketing advertisers to take advantage. Think of in headset eye tracking that allows the marketer to see what you are looking at in the Metaverse and for how long and the same goes for sort of wearable glasses to collect feedback can track our physical reactions to what we are looking at in the Metaverse and use that in what they are doing.

Looking at child protection, obviously lots of existing challenges for parents around child safety and monitoring on-line. Only made worse and stakes raised fire with on-line interactions when they are becoming more personal, more immersive.

Health concerns, incidentally came the addictions they are already recognised as disorders by WHO and as version experiences become more immersive again, it is likely that more people will struggle with this. It has already been called post VR sadness, which can be brought on when you go from the fantastical virtual world back into the real world.

There is access and equality, which we have touched on already. VR technology is very expensive and requires reliable and strong connectivity and that is going to include lots of people from accessing the Metaverse, particularly in the third world. Although it is an issue with the internet in general, there is a big leap in technological sophistication from straight forward on-line access to VR access.

There is desensitisation so there are experiences feel very real and it could lead to a general sensitisation to violence and anti-social behaviours similar to how video games to that effect as well.

Lastly, identity hacking and theft. So as the line between our additional and physical identity blurs, there is obviously a bigger risk posed by identity thieves as well as limited deception that are relatable to them. For example, the option the Metaverse presents to today's phone scammers who can replicate the appearance and voice of a relative.

Lucy: We are now going to come to discuss IP and the Metaverse, which is obviously mine and Charlie's favourite part of the talk, being IP lawyers. So we are just going to quickly cover some of the kind of other IP rights before we dive more thoroughly into brands. So given the lack of technical development in the Metaverse, brand related IP rights are really of the most relevant currently for the time being at least. However, before we go on, we are just going to touch up on the other rights.

So copyrights. Copyright is an automatic right in the UK. So, if you create something that qualifies for copyright protection, then the rights automatically exist without the need for any sort of registration. Undoubtedly, computer programme are needed in order to create virtual reality we are discussing and to implement them. The fact that these computer programmes are designed to run the Metaverse is kind of inconsequential as far as copyright is concerned. The same basic underlying principle applies to all computer programmes, so the underlying code is protected by copyright as well as certain visual aspects of their kind of user interface that you might see in the Metaverse.

Fundamentally, copyright protection is dependent upon whether work is made by a qualified person or whether it is published in a qualifying country. This begs the question which we are actually going to touch upon in relation to trademarks later, about how the Court will interpret the scope and validity of copyright works within the Metaverse, which has no boundaries, so where is geographical location for the purposes of copyrights.

Should quickly touch up on patents. As we have already discussed, creative reality of the Metaverse will require technological development and more often than not, that requires patent protection. As we have already discussed, last month saw the premier of Apple's Vision Pro, those headsets have already had over 5,000 patent application filed for them. So just a kind of a quick glance as to what one piece of technology requires in terms of patent. Beyond this tech owners might be relying on kind of copyright protection and trade secrets to do most of the heavy lifting. So as you might be aware, many patent offices including the EIPO exclude software from patent ability because it is an eligible subject matter. So that therefore makes kind of copyrights, which I have just discussed and much more important factor in this space.

Finally, just touching upon trade secrets. So in light of the challenges that patents face, the kind of registration and the enforcement of patents, businesses might be better off using these kind of trade secrets to protect their IP in the Metaverse. So trade secrets protect commercially valuable confidential information and gives the owner this kind of competitive advantage if it treats it as a secret. Fundamentally, trade secrets can last definitely if the secret is kept confidentially and out of the public domain. So that could also be a useful tool for IP owners within the Metaverse.

So now I am coming on to Brand Protection Metaverse. As we touched upon, it is clear that a number of brands are already being really proactive in the Metaverse, so we have got an example here of Ticket Master partnering with NFL. They produced game tickets in the form of NFTs, which is quite interesting and as part of that process, they have filed a number of trademark applications.

Vanity Fare launched an on-line digital art exhibition known as Meta vanity and also filed numerous trademark applications for the transmission of this kind of video experience.

Nike also prioritised staking its position in the Metaverse, so they filed a number of trademark applications of actual goods, as well as launching a virtual store known as Nike Land, which apparently has attracted almost seven million customers.

Charlie: So given the extent of Metaverse trademark activities we have already seen, that begs the question where is the Metaverse for trademark purposes. Much like the internet the Metaverse exists outside of geographical boundaries, so that raises the issue of brand owners when they are looking to enforce their trademark rights against people that are infringing them. The positive news is that you do not really need to drastically change your existing strategies on infringement, you just need to keep focusing on key jurisdictions and markets, but the protection offered the buyer trademark is obviously geographically restricted to wherever you have registered. So prior to registering their trademarks and jurisdictions where they want the protection, it may seem obvious to say, but a mark in the US will not provide protection against what would otherwise be infringement in the UK.

So that leads to the next question. When a trademark is used in the Metaverse, where in the physical world is it then being used and so what Court has jurisdiction on the dispute. In 2007 in the US, it was looked at to an extent in a case where a user of the virtual world brought an action against the operator, saying they had unlawfully conviscated his virtual property when they suspended his account. In looking at whether it had jurisdiction, the Court looked at the way Second Life was marketed and decided it had acted unlawfully because the game was partly to induce people throughout the US to purchase virtual property within the platform. So that indicates the Courts are willing to find jurisdiction in trademark improvement action purely based on the fact that the virtual world was marketed in a way that partially targeted any given jurisdiction. In a more recent case, and in fact the only decision we have so far of trademark improvement with NFTs is Hermès -v- Rothschild, which we are going to go into more detail later, but in short Hermès brought litigation in New York city on the basis that Rothschild were offering NFTs on the on-line marketplace OpenSea which is a Delaware Company, but with its principle being New York. Rothschild had customers purchasing NFTs in New York and Rothschild therefore were causing harm to Hermès in their principle place of business being, New York.

Some people have said that the answer to the issue around all this is to create a new Meta jurisdiction with rules that can be enforced by any stakeholder and not just within individual jurisdictions, but as probably we all know, legislative change is slow at the best of times, let alone when it involves collaboration between loss of jurisdictions. So whilst the Meta Virtual remains very much a work-in-progress, it is pretty unlikely the governments are going to get ahead of it and legislate to deal with these sorts of things in advance.

So now looking at trademark registration for virtual goods, there are some quite interesting questions that we raised on the Metaverse on the topic of trademark registration. When you are registering a trademark obviously you have to specify which categories of use the registration should protect, using the news classification system which is used pretty much around the world. At the moment, pretty much the only category of things we talked about so far today that is mentioned is in Class 9, which talks about downloadable digital files authenticated by NFTs. That has not stopped trademark offices all over the place receiving thousands of applications for goods and services relating to the Metaverse and people that are applying to register marks have found that there is often a disconnect between the appropriate category for a real good and its virtual equivalent. So take the example of shoe design, the physical good fits perfectly into Class 25, which covers clothing, footwear, headwear for human beings and virtual representation of that physical good, but does not fit into that category. In the US, they go as far as saying that they will reject applications that claim virtual goods in a class of their physical world counterparts. A recent case involving EUIPO labs is quite useful. They applied for a mark for Mark BAKC for digital collectibles sold as NFTs and they applied for that in Class 16. Class 16 being a Class 4, physical paper collectibles, such as trading cards. The USPCO said no you cannot do that instead you have to register that in the Class 9, if you want to cover the digital version.

So the current favoured approach of both in the US and in the UK, when you are applying for registration for Metaverse related marks, is to use the categories on the side as a sort of umbrella to cover everything, so you have got Class 9, which we have talked about, virtual goods, including those authenticated by NFTs, Class 35 which is marketplaces and exchanges for virtual goods, Class 36, which is financial exchange services relating to virtual goods, currencies, tokenisation and fractionation of physical world assets, Class 41, very important virtual experiences and Class 42, third party software providers and back end Blockchain coding services, but although there have been lots of Metaverse and trademark applications, actually comparative few have actually got through on to registers around the world. So although that is what we are thinking is a good approach at the moment, that may change and we just need to keep our eyes on it as things develop.

Lucy: So looking now at where the trademark registrations for their physical goods cover their virtual equivalent. So as Charlie discussed earlier, we currently only have one decision on this company coming from the US, which is Hermès and Rothschild. Hermès, the designer of luxury handbags took the artist, Mason Rothschild to Court for selling the virtual MetaBirkins he created as NFTs. We have got an image of that to the right for you. Hermès alleged that Rothschild was infringing the Birkin trademark as well as other ID rights that they owed and the Judge found in favour of Hermès, stating Rothschild use of MetaBirkin as a trademark for virtual goods is an infringement of Hermès and Birkin trademark.

So the Court actually went even further suggest that had Rothschild created virtual handbags, for instance, Avatars and the Metaverse and not simply just images of the handbags via NFTs, there would be even stronger arguments to suggest trademark infringement had taken place. This decision was really welcomed to brand owners for fear of Metaverse trademark squatting taking place. So a kind of free for all where brands were set to racing for the virtual world, a stake out of their IP, to stop individuals from profiting from their goodwill in their physical product. So it is not just Hermès that are currently encountering problems like this. A number of luxury brands are also experiencing similar issues, so Prada and Gucci have both already experienced Metaverse trademark squatters, trying to profit from their existing goodwill and the issue is not, I mean obviously Hermès and Rothschild has been really beneficial to brand owners, but it is not just this that is problematic because brand owners are still subject to kind of the expense of looking for these marks and the legal fees and drain on corporate resources and kind of monitoring these potential registrations that are occurring.

Charlie: So there are counter bits in the Metaverse. Whilst Metaverse provides brands with the opportunity to sell and host a virtual and physical products, it therefore comes a new digital forum for counterfeiters to do the same. As many of you are already aware, the development of the internet has significantly increased that accountability to sell the products, via easy means and through lots of channels in the digital world. The Metaverse is going to make this problem worse. Brand owners need to be forward thinking in their accountability investigations and enforcements to consider how the emerging platforms are going to basically open the gates to face. It is like Metaverse is going to open a whole new can of worms in terms of how accountability operate as well and that is why we need to be thinking about things like trademarks and brands as we have talked about already.

Platforms themselves are already considering the introduction of enforcements, measures, road blocks patent application for methods to detect counterfeit of] 3D objects and we expect other platforms are going to be similar as time goes on.

Lucy: So one ray of hope when considering the kind of future of brand enforcement within the Metaverse with its desire and emphasis on interability, so that concept that we discussed earlier of all the Metaverse platforms being accessible as one. Because of this focus, we are already seeing a number of the major players come together. So for instance, the Metaverse standard forum was set up last year. The forum includes all the big players, so we have got Meta, Microsoft and Games, Adobe and Sony. This is good for brand owners in the sense of the rules of the Metaverse that is being written now, so unlike its counterpart the internet where often regulation is kind of far behind the world west of the reality, this could hopefully provide unique opportunity for brand owners to kind of get their voices heard from the offset during this important initial gross stage of the Metaverse and then finally just looking at brand promotions and advertising within the Metaverse.

So, obviously given the significant investment by players such as Meta, we can see that the Metaverse does offer huge advertising possibilities and we are already seeing brands exploit this. So Gucci through its collaboration with robots, actually gave players the opportunity to win a digital version of their Gucci bag. There was not NFT. It was purely for use within the game row blocks and in 2021, it was interestingly resold fetching 4,115 US Dollars. Now interestingly, the physical version of this bag actually retailed for 3,400 US Dollars, so there is a bit of a comparison there between the virtual and the physical counterpart. But we just wanted to say, not to get caught out, and thinking that the Metaverse is in your area, that it will not be regulated as I just discussed earlier. Already, we are seeing regulation guidance being published. For instance, last year, the committee of advertising practice CAP published guidance on the Metaverse and as ever, we would always advise businesses to basically be as clear as possible when distinguishing between these kind of consumer experiences and advertising and makes that really clear to the consumer whether that be on the Metaverse or not.

Charlie: So hopefully you found some or all of this session insightful and/or interesting. We have got some key takeaways there for you. So obviously the Metaverse is parallel on-line world. It does not exist yet as it was envisaged, but it is still developing despite the setbacks it has had. Enforcing brands is going to be harder than ever in the Metaverse because of jurisdictional boundaries and brands should not assume they have existing protection for physical carries into the Metaverse. Instead they need to ensure they have coverage for those physical and digital versions of their goods and services and that is something they need to be thinking about now, not when things go wrong in five years' time, which is always the advice from a brands lawyer, but it is true.

So those are our takeaways and that brings us to the end of the webinar. We have run pretty much bang on time. Congratulations to you all. If you have got any questions, do type them into the Q&A box and we will try to answer them. I can see we do actually have quite a couple already.

So the first one, has the growth of AI affected development of the Metaverse? In a word I would say "yes" because obviously the text sphere is full of bubbles that burst all the time and it is possible that that is what is going on with the Metaverse, but AI is definitely their sort of topic at the moment because it has enormous potential uses in all walks of life, including within the Metaverse, so I think at the moment, people are definitely as we saw metered and they are focussing much more on AI than they are on the Metaverse. May be when legislation comes in on AI, if governments do go ahead of it and start restricting its use, then may be people will switch a bit more back to the Metaverse, but I think at the moment, although Metaverse will proceed to develop, it will be in parallel with AI as that storms ahead I think.

Lucy, have you got ….

Lucy: Yes. Ok let us have a look here. Given how quickly the Metaverse has faded in the last year, do you think it will remain relevant next year and if it does fail, why should brands keep investing in its protection or their protection in the Metaverse? It is an interesting point. I guess as Charlie just said there, there are a lot of bubbles that burst within the kind of technological developments and I think that does not mean that brands should not stay proactive and on top of these kind of things. Even if you look at some of the big players just this year, so Apple did release their VR Headsets this year, although that might not mean it is used for the Metaverse as it was envisaged by Meta, it might still be used and VR is probably likely to become a real manifestation in our future and because of that, I think it is still really important for brands to look at their kind of enforcement and their protection within these kind of virtual world, even if that is not as we envisage in the Metaverse.

Charlie: Another one. A conceptual question. Will the Metaverse ever exist in its sort of its full form? Again, in a word "no". I think there are too many competing interests that would be to converge for there to be this sort of utopia and Metaverse that everyone works together and there is one single platform to go into and that is it. I know obviously we have the internet, which sort of is like that, but things are slightly different because it is much more driven by individual promotional interests. I think what we will end up with is lots of mini Metaverses where certain companies and businesses do collaborate and come together, but to create their own sort of bubble, but there will not be one single platform that is the Metaverse as envisaged in in fiction and by Mr Zuckerberg.

I think that is all the questions we have got at the moment, so we can wrap up and give you four minutes of your lives back.

Thank you very much for attending. I hope you did get something out of that. If you see us at any of the other Leeds Digitial Festival Events, please do so "Hello". I am very tall, so it is not hard to see me. You are also going to be asked some feedback questions at the end, please do fill them out because they are helpful for us to know how we can keep content going forward. Otherwise enjoy the rest of your Friday.

Thank you very much. Cheers.

Lucy: Thank you everyone.