Amin Hosseini is an IPilogue Writer and an LLM Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

On Friday, November 11, 2022, FTX. Shortly after that, filed for bankruptcy, and a Japanese exchange called Bitfront shut down. FTX is a global, centralized cryptocurrency exchange based in the Bahamas. It enables customers to exchange their digital currencies for other digital currencies or regular money. Sam Bankman-Fried ("SBF”) was the CEO of FTX.

The collapse came when FTX. is the cryptocurrency exchange with the highest daily trading volume of cryptocurrencies globally. On November 9, Binance it would no longer purchase FTX, mentioning reports of mishandled funds and regulatory investigations. Since then, the price of has plunged by more than 90%. The FTX's native token is called . It is generally used as collateral for future positions and to lower trading fees.

 According to a report by , on November 2, Alameda Research ("Alameda”), the cryptocurrency trading firm led by SBF, was found to have an unusually high stockpile of FTT. FTX and Alameda's connections may have been more complex than had been previously disclosed, raising the question of whether FTX moved customers’ assets to Alameda. Since Alameda and FTX owned most of the FTTs, the other business would suffer severe financial consequences if one of them is compelled to sell or transfer its FTT holdings.

On November 6, that it would sell its FTT tokens. The value of FTT fell, triggering investors to race to sell their holdings in FTX out of concern that it would collapse like other cryptocurrency corporations. FTX rushed to execute withdrawal requests, but could not pay. As a consequence, FTX filed for bankruptcy.

John J. Ray, the new CEO of FTX, believes such a disaster is due to a lack of supervision and poor record-keeping. He numerous mismanagements leading to the disaster, including concealing misuse of customers' funds through software, using unprotected group emails, and communicating using applications with auto-delete features that restrict access to FTX records.

Platform customers, unsecured creditors, must wait in line to receive whatever assets the court may take from FTX based on priorities established by equitable principles. The bankruptcy has highlighted an $8 billion shortfall. After the fall of FTX, it will be more difficult for crypto exchanges to gain trust.

Industry experts are now predicting a "". The cryptocurrency market has long battled to win over investors and authorities. Investor trust in digital assets has weakened in the fallout of FTX, which will likely lengthen the impending crypto winter.

The FTX collapse underscores the lack of investor fund regulation in cryptocurrency markets. The cryptocurrency industry requires more stringent regulation to be rid the market of manipulation, fraud, mismanagement, cyber security risks, and money laundering. What steps will be taken to address these concerns will remain to be seen.

Further Reading:

The post The future of the crypto industry after the FTX collapse appeared first on IPOsgoode.

Amin Hosseini is an IPilogue Writer and an LLM Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

On , Sisvel International S.A. announced its Cellular IoT , consisting of 20 patent owners. By establishing this patent pool, the participating patent owners will create an offer to license all of their Patents required to implement the LTE-M and NB-IoT standards. Interestingly, Huawei Technologies and Nordic Semiconductor have also entered into a patent license agreement on , related to a portfolio of standard essential patents (SEPs) for LTE-M and NB-IoT owned by Huawei.

and are radio communication technology standards created by for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The cellular LPWAN IoT standards LTE-M and NB-IoT evolved from the 4G LTE standard.

LTE-M is a subset of LTE technology designed specifically for machine-to-machine communication. LTE-M enables IoT devices to send and receive enormous volumes of data without depleting their batteries. It has a latency of about 10-15 milliseconds and can enable cell handovers. On the other hand, NB-IoT employs shorter frequency bands, allowing this technology to exploit the more effectively. For NB-IoT, latency is roughly 10 to 100 times lower, and coverage is far broader.

Cellular networks exist to facilitate connection between devices. To keep the device connected to the nearest towers, they often ping cellular devices around them to acquire location. The battery is depleted by these constant . Thus, most IoT devices require substantially long-lasting batteries, and they consume a significant amount of energy.

LTE-M and NB-IoT provide IoT applications with effective connectivity. Batteries in LTE-M devices can survive ten years or longer because of features called and . IoT devices can employ their power-saving mode with these standards, allowing them to sleep when not in use. Additionally, they can prolong their sleep, so they do not have to wake up to send the location update. Devices can employ extended discontinuous reception with LTE-M. When the device is not in PSM mode, it frequently checks for downlink data. With extended discontinuous reception, the frequency of radio check-ins is extended, which lowers power usage.

In addition to the technological effectiveness of these standards, Sisvel’s patent pool helps makers of IoT devices by providing a clear structure for getting licenses under the pool's portfolio of LTE-M and NB-IoT SEPs. Generally speaking, bilateral licensing would be costly between a vast and rising number of businesses and holders. By setting up this patent pool, it is expected that transaction costs will be decreased for IoT projects.

With this Cellular Patent Pool, licensees can finalize a single license for various licensor portfolios and prevent royalty reporting and payments for each licensor. And, with multiple licensees, a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory () license for such SEP portfolios is feasible. Moreover, by providing licenses with standardized, pre-established terms and conditions, we may lessen prejudice among licensees. Due to the fair total royalties provided by patent pools, the potential patent hold-up by individual licensors could not be a grave concern.

A large percentage of IoT projects do not produce the anticipated results, or simply put, they fail. Recently, in-depth research on IoT initiative failure has been published by . The research concludes that nearly three-quarters of IoT projects are not considered successful.

 However, this unsuccessful rate has nothing to do with the IoT concept. IoT businesses have to deal with many challenges and risks such as unanticipated costs including litigation, inaccessibility to required technologies, and failure to develop a properly-designed business model. This Patent pool, along with other measures, is a viable solution to such concerns. Sisvel’s cellular IoT patent pool is a giant leap for IoT businesses which is set to encourage competition, market involvement, and greater commercial and legal certainty in the IoT industry.

Further reading:

To read more about the transaction costs savings engendered by patent pools, please see Measuring the Costs and Benefits of Patent Pools, Available at

The post Sisvel’s Cellular IoT Patent Pool: Paving the Way for More Effective IoT Integration appeared first on IPOsgoode.

Amin Hosseini is an IPilogue Writer and an LLM Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

The Singapore High Court ruled on 21 October 2022 that non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can now be considered property, . are blockchain-based assets with a distinct identification number and metadata which can represent real-world objects and cannot be copied or replaced. They are minted using smart contracts. In , the NFT's owner applied for a loan on and provided the as collateral. Later, he failed to make loan payments and asked for an extension. The defendant initially consented to offer an extension of time to repay the loan. However,  he also declared that if the loan was not fully paid by the timeframe, he would use the "foreclose" option of the NFTfi's Smart Program. The defendant then used the "foreclose" feature to move the NFT from the escrow account into his cryptocurrency wallet. The claimant reminded the defendant of their agreement but the defendant declined to negotiate further and declared he would keep the Bored Ape NFT for himself. He then advertised sale of the Bored Ape NFT.

The claimant then sued the defendant for an “equitable proprietary claim” over the Bored Ape NFT, conversion, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment. The claimant also requested a proprietary injunction banning the defendant from dealing with the Bored Ape NFT in any form.

The court had to determine whether the Bored Ape NFT, and NFTs in general, are capable of giving rise to proprietary rights which could be protected by an injunction in making its decision. In deciding the case, the court applied Lord Wilberforce’s criteria for property in National Provincial Bank Ltd v. Ainsworth (the “Ainsworth test”), which was previously used to decide if crypto assets are property.

According to the , “before a right or an interest can be admitted into the category of property, or of a right affecting property, it must be (1) definable, (2) identifiable by third parties, (3) capable in its nature of assumption by third parties, and (4) have some degree of permanence or stability.”

The court maintained that the test’s first criterion means that the asset must be capable of being isolated from other assets, whether of the same type or of other types. Thus, NFTs fulfil the first requirement, since they can be distinguished using their metadata. Second, the asset must have an owner who can be recognized by third parties. For NFTs, the presumed owner would be whoever manages the wallet that is connected to the NFT. The third requirement comprises two aspects: “third parties must respect the owner's rights in that asset, and that the asset must be potentially desirable.” Here, the court believed that these prerequisites would be satisfied because  the owner has the exclusive authority to transfer the NFT to a third party using blockchain technology and such NFTs are the subject of market activity. Finally, to satisfy the fourth requirement, the aforementioned NFT is as permanent and stable as money in bank accounts.

The court that NFTs meet the Ainsworth criteria and therefore may be formed as property in a general sense, leaving open the question of what the specific nature of this property right is. For the reasons outlined, the court approved the claimant's request for a proprietary injunction.

This decision demonstrates that NFTs can be considered property  separate from the item they represent. The judge's ruling is a turning point for NFTs and the decision may have widely applicable effects and implications.

Further reading

Read more mere about .

To read more about the absence of proper Regulation of NFT Platforms and the associated outcomes, please see .

For in-depth knowledge about how smart contracts combine property and contract functions, please see .

The post Steps forward: Singapore Deems NFTs as Property appeared first on IPOsgoode.

Amin Hosseini is an IPilogue Writer and an LLM Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School.

On September 22, 2021, and its independent fact-checkers for defamation. In the , Stossel claimed that he uploaded two short video reports in which he interviewed experts about climate change, yet  Meta (“Facebook”) publicly announced that Stossel’s reporting had failed the fact-checking process.  

In the first video, "Government Fueled Fires," Stossel stated that poor policies were the major cause of this year's fires and highlighted the importance of the role of climate change in the annual forest fires in California. Facebook examined the forest fire footage and marked it with a "missing context" label using its fact-checking tools.

 The second video, “Are We Doomed?,” questioned claims by “environmental alarmists” and elicited a similar response by Facebook’s fact-checking program — it was classified as "partly false information."

Stossel argued that the labels caused irreversible damage to his reputation, decreased the viewership of his content, and led to the loss of revenue. Regarding the first video, he claimed that Facebook attributed it to a statement that he did not produce; while for the second video, he stated that Facebook damaged his reputation by claiming he made false statements.

In response, Meta filed a motion for dismissal under and requested that the case be dismissed under (“SLAPP”). Briefly stated, SLAPP lawsuits  seek to suppress and stifle critics to force them to cease voicing their opposition. Therefore, to safeguard freedom of speech, some jurisdictions have enacted anti-SLAPP laws.

The Court  explained that the First Amendment protects expressions of subjective opinion and “not false statements or implied assertions of objective fact.” According to the judge, "[s]imply because the process by which content is assessed and a label applied is called a fact-check does not mean that the assessment itself is an actionable statement of objective fact.” In other words, the Court alluded that only reflects a subjective assessment of the "accuracy and reliability" of the claims and is not a statement of objective fact.   Accordingly then, the Court dismissed Stossel's lawsuit.

It is noteworthy that the spread of disinformation is pernicious. One salient example was the , where disinformation led to noncompliance with public health measures, such as masking, and high levels of vaccine reluctance.

To combat “fake news,” governments must carefully regulate social media content. For instance, based on a , if social media businesses operating in Germany do not remove unlawful, racist, or defamatory posts within 24 hours, they risk hefty fines. Ontario addressed this issue by passing the in 2015.

Since the definition of fake news and disinformation is so broad, however, overly strict laws may and imposing limits on access to justice. Therefore, legislation must strike a balance between upholding critics' freedom of speech with others' rights to protect their reputations against false claims.

Further Reading

To balance the Constitutional rights of the parties, access to justice and freedom of speech, a Minnesota Court outlined a method for determining if the SLAPP law should be employed. You may read .

The post Stossel v. Meta Platforms: The continuous fight against disinformation appeared first on IPOsgoode.

Amin Hosseini is an IPilogue Writer and an LLM Candidate at Osgood Hall Law School.

In recent years, many technical mechanisms to protect intellectual property have given their helping hands to IP owners and technology developers to enhance IP management and protection. is a prominent example.

content recognition (ACR) refers to the ability of an application to identify content based on sampling a portion and comparing it with a source service. ACR technologies are potential tools that can increase rights through several specific use cases. The European Union Intellectual Office (EUIPO) published a discussion paper, the second stage of a project begun in 2019, titled "" on September 22, 2022, and thoroughly examined the use cases, which are as follows:

1. Solutions to detect IP-infringing listings on e-commerce marketplaces;
2. Smartphone solutions to detect genuine or counterfeit products;
3. Solutions to recognize 3D printing files and 3D-printed products;
4. Solutions to protect and manage copyright and neighbouring rights on content-sharing services; and
5. Solutions to identify live streams of IP-protected content.

The analysis for each use case includes a description of the problems that ACR solutions can solve, as well as the benefits and drawbacks, not only from a technical standpoint but also in dealing with complex legal issues.

Data is indispensable in training recognition solutions to identify infringement on online marketplaces. To ensure accuracy, content recognition technologies require high-quality data and computational resources. E-commerce marketplaces need many photos, descriptions, and other metadata to create, train, and use recognition technologies. In addition to being a costly process, it is challenging to determine what legally constitutes an infringement of IP. That is why human experts must evaluate the infringement in question.

For smartphones, where they perform to detect genuine or counterfeit products, the quality of the datasets is critical in the training and improvement of the detection models since it allows the ACR technologies to analyze and compare the data gathered and received. This is done by , which is conducted by recognizing an extract of a piece of content. Data collection, storage, and processing necessitate  numerous computer resources when feeding databases with captured photographs produced by smartphone users. Resources required to create, store, and compare fingerprints might vary significantly depending on the product and the fingerprint's complexity.

The scenario is different for 3D files and products. The use case employs to detect IP infringement. Since there is no requirement for a reference database, it is not necessary to use a lot of data or processing power to recognize previously watermarked files or printed products. However, it can take a lot of resources to add watermarks to each  copy of a file or printed product and then detect them once more. In addition, without standardized watermarking methods, a system employing one technology cannot read a watermark produced by a system employing a different technology.

Most content-sharing services rely on fingerprinting-based solutions offered by third-party vendors. Hence, it is exceedingly challenging to locate reference datasets for developing ACR systems because not all businesses use the same test environments. Furthermore, based on , for content-sharing service providers to take appropriate action and make sure that specific copyright-protected content is not accessible on their platform, IP owners must provide them with all relevant and necessary information. The effectiveness of this mechanism will depend on how this provision is put into practice and how well the relevant parties work together.

Cases where ACR systems incorrectly match the content supplied to a content-sharing service with content in the reference database and inappropriately restricted it is also a significant legal challenge, especially when they impair users' .

According to the EUIPO`s paper, another issue is the lack of standards and interoperability between various fingerprinting-based solutions, which forces IP owners to submit their materials or related fingerprints to various content-sharing services and solution providers without the benefit of specific procedures.

A further challenge for ACR technologies in content-sharing platforms is applying specific copyright limitations or exceptions to content.  A human review procedure where IP owners and users can voice their opinions may be necessary. The removal of perfectly lawful content can also be a problem if someone makes erroneous or abusive claims of ownership over it.

Finally, feeding the content into the ACR reference databases to discover unauthorized streams is a problem in the context of securing live-streamed events, especially with fingerprinting solutions. There needs to be further agreements and technological arrangements between IP owners and ACR systems.

Further Reading

For more information on Artificial Intelligence & Intellectual Property see Daniel Kiat Boon, Detecting and Prosecuting IP Infringement with AI: Can the AI Genie Repulse the Forty Counterfeit Thieves of Alibaba? (November 29, 2019). Artificial Intelligence & Intellectual Property, 2019, Available at SSRN:

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