Mariya Ortynska, IPStyle managing partner, trademark and patent attorney and attorney, was a speaker at BE SUSTAINABLE! Fashion Summit No Season 2021 Vol. 3: Digital edition, which is a part of Ukrainian Fashion Week. During the speech, Mariya told about virtual (VR) and augmented (AR) reality in fashion in terms of intellectual property.
Key takeaways from Mariya’s speech:
- 2020 and 2021 are the years of fantastic reality.
- For the user and developer, AR and VR are convenient. However, the business owner has dozens of questions, which can be divided into three groups: How do you not violate third-party rights (IP rights and beyond)? How to protect your rights? How to make a sale, a license, a partnership?
- What can be found on the Internet should not be taken as free and without permission.
- Intellectual property laws can’t keep up with new technologies.
- Everything you create and invent in AR and VR can be divided into two parts — content (copyright) and technology (patents).
- When you create something in AR and VR, you have to imagine yourself as filmmakers and then as lawyers in film production and understand that every letter, every print, every object in the background can be copyrighted.
- Patents are territorial.
- If someone creates a custom design for the fashion company, the latter has to take care of transferring all rights to it.
- A customer who used to buy ordinary clothes now becomes a user who buys a digital product. In addition to consumer rights, the user has other rights: the image right, the right of publicity, the right to privacy.
- Today a fashion company should be a bit of a tech company.
- Previously, when a customer bought something, it was a verbal agreement with the store. Now you have to develop Terms of Use, which have to be on the website and on the app.
