CITMA 2019: IP in a digital world
Rapidly developing technologies and online IP enforcement pose the biggest challenge in terms of IP rights in an increasingly digital world.
This was the view put forward by Selma Ünlü, senior partner at NSN law firm in Istanbul, who spoke today, March 15 at the spring conference of the Chartered Institute of Trademark Attorneys (CITMA) in London.
Ünlü, whose expertise includes information technology law, said that many “traditional means of protecting IP rights are no longer fit for purpose in today’s high-tech world”.
She cited some of the challenges that have arisen for IP practitioners seeking to come to grips with new technologies. Products such as the Apple Watch, for example, are multi-purpose technologies which are registered in a number of different classes.
For such products, this can lead to problems in proving genuine use in trademark opposition cases, she said, due to the broad scope of registration.
She also touched on the challenges of enforcing IP in an increasingly digital world. Noting what she called a “whack-a-mole” phenomenon with regards to taking down infringing websites, Ünlü said it was becoming “extremely difficult” to effectively enforce online copyright.
This is particularly true given the lack of any “uniform, international mechanism” to enforce online IP law. The enforcement of anti-counterfeiting measures in particular, she said, posed a challenge when having to work across different jurisdictions, as infringers often use multiple websites based in different countries.
She praised Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba’s “proactive” counterfeiting prevention measures as a “practical” example of how rights owners and online platforms could engage with online technology to enforce IP. Alibaba’s anti-counterfeiting measures use image and semantic recognition software to monitor its online marketplace.
Ünlü also touched on the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), and noted the uncertainty over the ownership of AI-generated work and the legal capacity of the infringer.
Although there have “not been many” patent infringement cases related to AI as of yet, Ünlü predicted this would increase in the future.
Concluding on a positive note, however, Ünlü said she was “not pessimistic” about the future of IP in a digital world. She told the conference that she was confident that as AI and other modern technologies such as blockchain came to play an increasingly prominent role in daily life, that practitioners would be “more creative to find solutions” to the challenges they pose.
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