Intellectual Property Rights in the Metaverse

The contribution is examining the exciting technological phenomenon of the metaverse through the lens of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and their potential application in this virtual ecosystem. More precisely, the focus of the paper is on three types of Intellectual Property Rights – Copyright, Patents and more extensively Trademarks. Firstly, the author offers some definitions and pinpoints the main features of the emerging virtual realities, as well as clarifies their interplay with blockchain technologies. Also, she underlines the flexibility of IPRs and the intangible nature of their protected subject matter, which makes it easier to extend the implementation of their legal norms from the real world to the realms of the metaverse. Further, the paper explores for each of the three IPRs the potential to contribute to the development of the metaverse and its economy, e.g. through the creation of virtual works of art and trading with “art NFTs”; registering Patens for hardware systems and devices that enable access to the metaverse (e.g. AR or VR glasses), and creating, trading and protecting through Trademarks virtual goods, which represent intangible twins of their branded real-life products.