Building Digital Markets in the Metaverse: Reconsidering the Role of Intellectual Property Rights, Licensing Agreements and NFT’s

Abstract

[ES] El presente trabajo aborda algunas de las incertidumbres que surgen con ocasión de la creación de NFTs que contienen total o parcialmente derechos de propiedad intelectual o industrial sobre objetos digitales tridimensionales y la necesidad de clarificar este régimen jurídico de cara a su estandarización en los procesos legales e infraestructurales indispensables para la creación de metaversos y que estos operen como mercados de bienes digitales de forma análoga a la realidad física.

[EN] Being the Metaverse the future next big project for online communication and socialization, digital assets tenancy becomes increasingly relevant. However, contractual models developed under Web 2.0 paradigm, that take Copyrights and end user licensing agreements as their legal infrastructure, may be poorly suited to generate future digital marketplaces. The copyright licensing system works best in unidirectional, bipolar transaction schemes, yet may become an important friction in the multipolar many-to-many transactions promised by the metaverse. Two opposite solutions emerge: centralize the copyright management into the new metaverse platforms, known as orchestrators; or better implementing licensing agreements through smart contracts, making possible to state that code is law.