In The AmLaw Litigation Daily: Another Napster? Brown Rudnick’s Peter Willsey Expects NFTs to Fuel New IP Disputes

Partner Peter Willsey was featured in a Q&A with The AmLaw Litigation Daily regarding the market for non-fungible tokens (NFT) and how it may fuel new IP disputes.

In the Feb. 8 article, Willsey said it is an exciting time in the NFT world, where artists, musicians and creators of all sorts are harnessing the ability to create scarcity for certain digital assets on the blockchain, as something akin to what happened when Napster opened the door to mass peer-to-peer file sharing.

“Every time there is a new technology that can be used by people to sell things, that gives rise to new trademark and copyright issues,” Willsey said. “NFTs are a great example of that. Both trademark and copyright considerations come into play. There are original works of authorship, which are copied and turned into NFTs and then sold. People need to understand that someone owns the copyrights and the original works of authorship, which are embodied in NFTs. So you need to have the rights to do what you want to do with it.”

Click here to read the Q&A.