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Patent Infringement in the Metaverse

How to ensure that no one reads an article thanks to its title

Recently, la Universidad Externado de Colombia, was kind enough to invite me to participate as a speaker in its traditional Intellectual Property Congress.

The proposed topic for my presentation? Patent infringement in the Metaverse.

After studying the subject I came to the conclusion that I had 20 minutes to say that there is not much to say.

I then focused on an important idea. Not all revolutions are the same and sometimes our norms are already ready to face them.

Despite everything we've read, we still don't know what our life on the metaverse will be like, and really how disruptive and new it will be for us.

It sounds like a revolution, but it's actually ANOTHER revolution related to the digital environment, one more that could again change our lives.

The first web, 1.0 was the one we accessed on a PC, through a modem, in which my identity was my email. The second web 2.0 is the platform or app in which we access through a mobile phone, connected by broadband, in which my identity is my social login. And the third web new to us, is the metaverse which we access through virtual reality glasses, connected by 5G, and in which my identity is my avatar.

But if we look back, that first digital revolution of the internet, we needed to have an interface with which to access that new world.

It was a new world and its access needed a device to enter. That device was a computer. Today my computer (phone or tablet) is a thousand times more powerful but it remains the same: It is a digital device with a hard drive, a keyboard and a mouse that allows access to digital and soon virtual content.

Nowadays the hard drive is the size of a fingernail and has a tera of capacity, the CPU is much more powerful in my cell phone than the best desktop computer 15 years ago, the keyboard is now a touchscreen, the mouse is my finger, and the internet connection is much faster,  everything is much more powerful  fast and is and more present in my life, because now I need to transmit receive and send much more data.

Today it might be much more powerful and immersive but the concept remains identical and we still need the same: A CPU, A hard drive, our screen is not the cell phone screen but the virtual reality helmet our mouse is no longer our finger running through a screen but our eyes or our hands making sliding gestures or a glove.

All this evolution, these evolutions of revolutions are full of patents.

Although the different web eras and their conceptually associated technologies are the same, the technological leap, the amount of knowledge, of development that is contained since that first great revolution is considerable.

There are a huge number of patents associated with digital in previous revolutions and now there are others that respond to the specific needs of the web 3.

There are countless patents related to the metaverse. But they would not imply a change related to the metaverse itself and the question is whether they would actually involve new challenges from the point of view of intellectual property enforcement.

The Internet and obviously the digital revolution have implied great challenges in the enforcement of rights, but in general those challenges in the previous digital web revolutions are still very similar to the one that is coming to us.

Already directly related to the issue of the metaverse there are several patent disputes and controversies between companies. Regarding the virtual reality glasses, the company Meta (Facebook) was accused by a company called Immersion, which has 6 patents covering what are called haptic effects, the process of feeling or touching virtual objects.

Is this legal and rights-reaching discussion between Meta and Immersion an example of patent infringement in the metaverse? No. Rather, it is a patent infringement debate for the metaverse.

There is nothing new about this dispute between the two companies. The courts and the actions are the same as always, and so are the arguments. This discussion will take place in the same way as a patent dispute for a grass mower, and all those issues that have been talked about jurisdictional challenges because the metaverse is a new country that is not clear where it is, do not apply either. This virtual reality helmet is manufactured in a real country and is marketed in another real country and if it is considered that in one of the two there is a patent right that is being infringed, the corresponding traditional actions will be carried out, as with the grass mower.

On the other hand, if there is a topic that could be interesting and that is the "overpatenting" or high-density patent sectors. It refers to the sectors in which there is so much movement, activity and interest and therefore so many patent applications, that in practice, it will be much more difficult to be able to determine clearly whether there are infringements or not.

Detecting patent infringement in the metaverse has practical difficulties. Even in the jurisdiction where you have a patent for software, or if in Colombia it could be protected by proving that it is a computer-implemented invention, patents on the metaverse, not the metaverse, work behind the scenes. They are not as visible to the final consumer.

Finally, it is interesting to talk about blockchain that allows in real life and in the metaverse to provide authenticity to a good or an object or even a process. It's a good thing that right holders (and consumers, or those who enforce the metaverse) could use blockchain to mark the origin and authenticity of proprietary materials and thus more easily detect infringing products.

We will see.

Authors

Portrait ofKarl Mutter, LL.M.
Karl Mutter, LL.M.
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Bogotá