The French Fashion House Hermes decided to achieve a complete ban on NFT series sales with Birkin bags. The company appealed to the federal court with a request to ban the artist Mason Rothschild to advertise, sell and own digital tokens issued by him from the Metabirkin collection, after the jury established that they violate the Germes rights to the Birkin trademark, Reuters reported.
Rothschild created the NFT-collection of Metabirkin from a hundred objects with the image of Birkin bags in 2021. A series of these digital tokens brought the artist more than 200 Ethereum (about $ 790 thousand at that time).
In February, the jury in New York ruled that Rothschild violated Hermess intellectual property rights, promoting and selling his NFT Metabirkin. He was ordered to pay $ 133 thousand as compensation for damage.
In his new statement, Hermes claims that Rothschild continues to promote on the site and on social networks the NFT mentioned, despite the court’s decision, and receives 7.5% of the royalties from sales. A fashion house asks the federal court to intervene and force Rothschild not only to stop selling digital assets, but also to transfer all the remaining NFT of Hermess.
The February decision of the court in favor of Hermes was recognized as an essential precedent who questioned the question of whether NFT are works of art or goods. Rothschild lawyers argued that the author should be protected by the right to artistic expression in accordance with the first amendment to the US Constitution, but the court considered it differently. As in the case of Metabirkins, other different NFT collections are borrowed by elements of existing intellectual property, which can lead to a number of such trials.
Rothschild’s lawyer Rett Millsaps called the filing of the claim “a serious excess of authority by Hermes and an attempt to punish Rothschild, because they do not like his work.” According to him, the defendant’s side will object to Hermes’s petition this week.