French luxury brand Hermes wins NFT trademark infringement lawsuit
French luxury design house Hermès has won a lawsuit against Mason Rothschild, the artist behind the “MetaBirkins” non-fungible token (NFT) collection, which features digital illustrations of Hermès’ popular Birkin bags.
Rothschild created the Metabirkins NFT collection in 2021, which they classified as one of the 100 most unique NFT collections ever created, in a range of contemporary colour and graphics execution. The sale has fetched over 200 ETH as a collection and is worth $331,684 at the time of writing. Hermes filed a complaint and lawsuit against the artist early last year for trademark infringement, and Rothschild argued at the time that NFC was required to be covered under the First Amendment to the US Constitution. and the artist’s defense team compared his work to Andy Warhol, who painted Campbell’s soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles in his artwork, and Rothschild argued in court that it was The images and the NFTs that represent them are definitely not handbags and carry nothing but meaning.
Hermes’ lawyers allege Rothschild was stealing Hermes’ well-known intellectual property goodwill to create and sell his own line of products, arguing that “customers can use MetaBirkins NFTs as genuine products.” and it was further stated that the Metabirkins URL is identical to the URL used by the luxury brand, as Oren warshavsky, an attorney representing Hermes, stated in court that the reason was the name Birkin.”
A New York jury, after deliberating definitively for two days, returned a verdict Wednesday that it had found the defendant guilty of trademark infringement and found him guilty of dilution of the trademark and In addition it held that “First Amendment protection does not prevent liability.” The jury awarded Hermes $133,000 in damages—of which $110,000 was for trademark infringement and $23,000 for cybersquatting.
