Elena Varese

Milan Fashion Week and Fashion Law Trends: Is Metaverse the New Fashion Revolution for IP?

Neal Stephenson coined the term “metaverse” in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, where it referred to a 3D virtual world inhabited by avatars of real people, sometimes facilitated by the use of virtual and augmented reality devices, which would blur the barrier between online and offline.

Milan Fashion Week and Fashion Law Trends –  Monograms: just letters or powerful trademarks?

By Elena Varese e Lara Mastrangelo The Milan Fashion Week has just started and from today we are glad to host for the second time some highlights on the major fashion law trends of this season. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” used to claim Juliet in the famous Shakespeare’s play, …

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Use of excerpts of videogames and eSports competitions without the right holder’s consent: is it fair use (or the Princess is in another castle)?

Publications sharing tips on how to complete videogames and maximise bonuses might increase with the expansion of the eSport competitions. The same applies to platforms streaming videogames alone or together with eSport actions of the various players. Yet are these activities possible without the right holders’ consent?

Under Italian law, videogames are protected as a whole as copyright works like movies, whilst their frames could be protected as simple photographies (with protection lasting 20 years from their publication). Following a different opinion, videogame frames could be excluded from protection, as they may considered similar to documents, as provided by Art. 87, last sentence of the Italian Copyright Law (ICL).

Milan Fashion Week and Fashion Law Trends: Use and protection of fashion archives

The Milan Fashion Week has just started and from today we are glad to host some highlights on the major fashion law trends of this season.

Heritage is one of the major assets a fashion company holds and the ultimate tendency of this Fashion Week is to revamp old creations from the maison’s archives.

Firstly, it should be assessed whether the fashion company can use its own archives. This seems to be a plain question, however, in practice, it could happen that, despite being the owner of the physical copies of sketches and preparatory works of certain garments or motifs, the company does not hold the IP rights over such creations of the past.

The fight against counterfeiting continues: the first Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List is now out.

After the public consultation launched last January, on 7 December 2018, the European Commission (EC) published the first Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List, which provides examples of reported marketplaces or service providers located outside the EU and engaged in counterfeiting and piracy.

Such Watch List was highly expected by right holders and represents the last measure adopted by the EC against infringers, after the Overview of the functioning of the Memorandum of Understanding on the sale of counterfeit goods via the internet (MoU) in 2016 and the Guidelines for online platforms to tackle illegal content in 2017.

#Adv or not #Adv? This is the question.

On 26 June 2018, the Italian Advertising Authority (IAP) took a step further on online advertising and issued one of its first decisions based on the Digital Chart and art. 7 of the Advertising Self-Regulatory Code (the “Code”). The case was about some Instagram Stories and a picture published by the Italian singer Fedez on …

#Adv or not #Adv? This is the question. Read More »