This article appeared in The Intellectual Property Strategist, an ALM/Law Journal Newsletters publication that provides a practical source of both business and litigation tactics in the fast-changing area of intellectual property law, including litigating IP rights, patent damages, venue and infringement issues, inter partes review, trademarks on social media – and more.
NFTs have been all the rage in the world. Mike Winkelmann, a digital artist known professionally as Beeple, sold a collage of his digital images for a record-breaking $69 million. About two weeks later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s first tweet (“just setting up my twttr”) sold for $2.9 million. Sports icons like LeBron James and Tom Brady have leapt into this market, with a video clip of less than a minute showing James dunking a basketball having been sold for over $200,000. And now, in what many are calling a “social media experiment” that could inspire an episode in the dystopian sci-fi television series Black Mirror, one can buy and sell tokens based on speculating in celebrities’ reputations on BitClout, a social cryptocurrency exchange platform.
