In the Texas Lawyer article “Luxury Watch Giants Sued in Texas Over NFT Tech in Patent Showdown,” partner Mauricio Uribe offered insight into a recent lawsuit in the Eastern District of Texas that highlights the increase of NFT-related intellectual property litigation.
The article focuses on a recently initiated patent infringement case filed by Watch Skins Corp. against LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton and TAG Heuer SA related to technology that displays non-fungible token (NFT) artwork on a smart watch. The patents-in-suit are not related to any specific type of underlying blockchain technology or vendor, but are directed at the application layer in which users provide authorization to display NFTs on a watch by syncing with wallet functionality on a mobile device.
Speaking to the prevalence of patent litigation concerning NFTs, Uribe said, “NFTs, and blockchain itself, are still ever-present in our technology. You’re starting to see these patents that were filed at the peak time of NFTs at the height of the coronavirus pandemic progress through the examination phase of the patent office.”
Because of this, Uribe maintained that practitioners will “likely start to see and likely continue to see more NFT patent disputes.”
Read the full article on Law.com here [subscription may be required].
