My firm recently bought a new virtual reality headset. Why, you ask? The answer is simple: for me to explore intellectual property and digital assets in virtual, mixed and augmented reality.
Well, why is this necessary? The rapid development of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality technologies has created a dynamic and expanding landscape that is reshaping how we experience and interact with digital and physical environments. For intellectual property law specialists, exploring the legal intricacies of VR, AR, and MR is increasingly essential. These fields introduce unique challenges in copyright, trade mark, and patent law, along with fresh opportunities to help clients protect and leverage their IP rights in new, immersive ways.
Although virtual reality headsets are still largely considered expensive, it has become increasingly accessible to consumers. For many brands, this unlocks a new opportunity to engage with consumers, and especially younger consumers who would be more inclined to buy a virtual reality headset.
This new opportunity, however, also creates the scope for more IP infringement to take place. As a new medium of entertainment and productivity, it becomes vitally important to also know how your IP can be infringed (or how you can infringe someone else’s IP), in VR, AR and MR.
Let’s use a practical example.
Meta recently launched a new app called Hyperscape, in which you use an app on your mobile phone to scan your environment around you, with the environment then being reconstructed for you to enter virtually – alone or with other people. The technology is not new: it is already possible to do various virtual museum tours, real estate tours and tours of natural locations (BRINK Traveler, for example), that are renditions of real-world locations.
This technology, however, makes it possible for any user to scan their own environment, which capabilities could be used in the future for developers to commercialise their own environment (or a public location) into their own application. It may therefore be possible to create a virtual reality game, for instance, that takes place in your favourite supermarket.
Why is this a problem? For the simple fact that most environments (and especially a supermarket) are full of trade marks. If you scan a supermarket for example, you will see a trade mark in every direction you look. These trade marks will inherently be pulled into the scan and will appear in the virtual world, without the permission of the trade mark owner.
Does this amount to trade mark infringement? Not necessarily. Although this will be expanded on at a later stage.
In the coming weeks, I will be exploring all things IP in VR, AR and MR (and with me being quite the gaming connoisseur – with quite a bit of focus placed on VR, AR and MR games). This exploratory journey will not only be for us to understand the nuances of this field and the safeguarding of IP in this new medium, but will hopefully also be an informative (and fun) way to showcase how IP interplays in the new and emerging technology of extended reality.
