IP Quick Tip: Trademarks for the Metaverse 101

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The good news is that there is not yet a trademark office in the Metaverse. This also means that you should be suspicious should you receive any emails or letters from a Metaverse trademark office asking for payments.

Trademarks for the Metaverse have to be filed with the usual suspects: the physical trademark offices all around the world. Based on what the EUIPO has published so far, here is what you should know when drafting the list of goods and services of your EU trademark applications for the Metaverse:

Given that the Metaverse is a virtual world, the goods there are also virtual goods. These virtual goods are images, so they are digital content. With this knowledge in mind, it should also become clearer how to classify individual goods.

Firstly, the goods belong to Nice Class 9.

Secondly, keep in mind that the term “virtual goods” is considered not to be sufficiently clear. So you have to specify it further by stating the content to which the virtual goods relate.

Here’s an example: If you want to file a trademark application for virtual shirts, you could file a trademark application in class 9 for “downloadable virtual goods, namely, virtual shirts”.

In contrast, the classification of services relating to virtual goods remains unchanged. Thus, retail services in the Metaverse, for example, still belong to Nice Class 35, with retail services still having to be specified.