Navigating the Metaverse Patent Regime

The Metaverse offers a range of possibilities, including the ability to overlay digital content in the real world and transfer real-world traits to an entirely online setting. A sense of immersion, real-time interactivity, user agency, platform, device compatibility, and concurrent engagement between thousands of individuals at once are just a few of the qualities and objectives it combines.

The Metaverse is a shared virtual world that uses augmented reality and virtual reality equipment, theoretically blending the lines between the actual and virtual worlds. Entertainment, gaming, education, fashion, and finance are the sectors most likely to have an immediate impact on the Metaverse. Recently, many businesses have been developing ideas for the Metaverse and moving through with patent applications to safeguard this intellectual property. In addition to entertainment, this area is purchased for business needs. Signzy, an Indian fintech company, recently obtained a U.S. patent for its ground-breaking method of customer onboarding in the Metaverse. According to a quick patent search, multiple metaverse filings have occurred months earlier. The difficulties that may be encountered when evaluating metaverse patent applications will be covered in this article.

Patenting Hardware

A patent for a real-world theme park guide that immerses riders in a 3D virtual world while simultaneously localizing and mapping it was given to Disney in February 2022. (SLAM). With 3D projection-based imaging, this method will be utilized to map park visitors’ surroundings as they walk around the real world. Disney characters’ holograms will be projected, offering a deeply immersive but unique experience (US11210843B1). It is noteworthy that both hardware and software technologies will be needed. Many things could be patented in the Metaverse, ranging from multiple V.R. headset wearers to algorithms for generating and moving virtual shapes and scenes based on hand gestures, head motion, or line of sight of the user; systems for optimizing shared views of virtual objects to techniques for creating 3D avatars of the users. Since V.R. technology is developing quickly, it is difficult for courts and patent offices to distinguish one V.R. technology’s novelty from another. Virtual reality and augmented reality headsets are the subjects of numerous patents, with only minor technical differences. Determining innovation and inventiveness may become impossible due to the variety of enhancements that can be made to this gear. Nevertheless, elusive technological advancements may make an invention patentable, as seen by the abundance of patents that have already been issued globally.

Another tendency is that technology is moving away from purely entertainment-based V.R. patents and toward more inclusive, practical, and beneficial applications, like surgical simulators, sophisticated medical database visualization, and data on rehabilitation. Many businesses have been pursuing patents to safeguard the technology that underlies such advancements in hardware. As a result, the courts must decide whether a specific patented product for reality can be extended to a VR/AR product from a different company.

Patenting Software

In contrast to software technology, obtaining a patent for hardware technologies for the Metaverse is quite easy. On the other hand, getting software patents for metaverse technologies is likely harder due to stricter eligibility requirements. When evaluating such inventions, examiners typically focus on whether a software-based invention is merely a manual or mental process contained within a computing environment. The metaverse setting is included in the application of this principle. In Alice Corp. v. C.L.S. Bank, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the same. Determining whether the process operating in the metaverse environment is equal to the same or similar process operating outside the metaverse environment is another factor in evaluating a metaverse innovation for novelty/non-obviousness, according to Joseph Wolfe of DLA Piper. It might be challenging for applicants to overcome the prior art if, for instance, the only distinction between the proposed invention and the prior art is that the proposed invention is limited to the metaverse environment.

The eligibility requirements have been lowered in the U.S. with the publication of the 2019 Patent Eligibility Guidance by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Examiners must use a broad definition of an “abstract idea” to consider subject matter categories that contain specific ways of categorizing human activity, mental processes, and mathematical concepts. It has been shown in European Patent Office (EPO) decision G1/19 that it can be challenging to patent simulation-related inventions through the EPO. In conclusion, while it may not always be simple to protect software creations, there is undoubtedly potential for innovation given that most of the Metaverse will be based on simulation, whether of actual locales and circumstances or fictional ones. There is ample opportunity to secure protection for all varieties of metaverse inventions, albeit caution should be used to place the software inventions in a patent-friendly manner.

Patenting Designs

To safeguard an object’s ornamental design, design patent protection is available in both the United States and Canada. Instead of using an examination system, Europe and other jurisdictions use a registration system. Corporations are expected to try to use design patent protection for any new, unique, and ornamental designs that they are using in the Metaverse as they attempt to engage their customers in the virtual sphere and use it as a powerful marketing tool. According to Thomas Brooke of Holland & Knight, “A virtual business may have a virtual product design as its primary core asset, aspects of which may need protection as trade dress under trademark law or through a design patent.” According to the USPTO‘s Manual of Patent Examining Procedure, which will be published in December 2020, “Computer-generated icons, such as full-screen displays and individual icons, are 2-dimensional images, alone are surface ornamentation,” and that meet the “article of manufacture” requirement of 35 U.S.C. 171, it is implied that designs for “projections, holograms, and virtual and augmented reality” are patentable. Fashion Weeks are now held in the Metaverse, with the first on March 24, 2022. The first publication of fashion and NFT designs in a hybrid fashion week that is streamed and held in person raises some crucial issues that have not yet been resolved, including how designers can safeguard their creations. What would now be seen as the first publication is a question that courts must decipher.

Future of Patents

Given that the laws have traditionally not been created to be applied in a setting where reality and computer-generated simulation collide, the Metaverse is certain to present its specific challenges for obtaining patent protection for both examiners and practitioners. To establish some recommendations for these applications, one can anticipate that these will correspond with the same principles for patenting blockchain and artificial intelligence advancements. It will be important to take advantage of these more recent opportunities to become familiar with the metaverse environment to maintain the IP-Laws’ dynamic nature and aid in their adaptation to new technological developments.