The Legit Ledger Podcast Ep. 4
Detecting and Enforcing IP Infringement in Web3 with Kevin Tian, CEO at Doppel
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Listen to the original podcast released June 28, 2022 here: https://www.sheppard.com/multimedia-408
In this week’s episode of The Legit Ledger, Sheppard Mullin attorneys Yasamin Parsafar and Jim Gatto are joined by Kevin Tian, Co-founder and CEO at Doppel, to discuss the detection and enforcement of IP infringement in Web3, including the types of breaches typically seen and the options available for enforcement once a potential violation is identified.
Guests:
About Kevin Tian
Kevin Tian is a Silicon Valley veteran whose pre-Doppel career includes engineering stints at Uber and Lyft. Launched with co-founder and fellow ex-Uber engineer Rahul Madduluri in February 2022, Doppel indexes NFT data across various blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, and Flow, leveraging models that incorporate keywords and metadata to spot fraud. The Doppel platform is currently integrated with OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace, and in the process of integrating with others. Dapper Labs, one of the biggest names in the space and the company behind the NBA’s Top Shot NFTs, has already signed on as a Doppel client. The company has also begun piloting its product with Yuga Labs, creator of the Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC) collection, and is in the early design stages with a few others.
About Jim Gatto
Jim Gatto is a partner with the Intellectual Property Practice Group in Sheppard Mullin’s Washington, D.C. office, where he co-leads the Blockchain & Fintech Team. His practice focuses on blockchain, interactive entertainment, digital art, AI, and online gambling. He advises clients on IP strategies, development and publishing agreements, licensing and technology transaction agreements, and tech regulatory issues. Jim has been involved with blockchain since 2012 and has been recognized as a thought leader by leading organizations, including Best Lawyers in America 2021-2022; Cryptocurrency, Blockchain and Fintech Trailblazer, The National Law Journal, 2018; and Thought Leader on Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies, National Law Review, 2018.
About Yasamin Parsafar
Yasamin Parsafar is a partner with the Intellectual Property Practice Group in Sheppard Mullin’s San Francisco office, where she serves as co-leader of the firm’s Blockchain & Fintech team. Her practice focuses on protecting her clients’ intellectual property rights through counseling, prosecution, enforcement, and litigation. Yasamin leverages her litigation experience to strengthen and protect her clients’ intellectual property, manage risks, and position businesses to succeed in the event of a dispute. She frequently advises and protects brands venturing into web3 on various issues related to non-fungible tokens, metaverses, games, online marketplaces, and other platforms.
Transcript:
Yasamin Parsafar:
Thanks everyone for joining today, we're going to be discussing monitoring for and enforcing intellectual property infringement with NFTs. I'm Yasamin Parsafar and joining me is Jim Gatto, my partner at Sheppard Mullin. We are both partners in the intellectual property practice group, and co-lead the blockchain team. With us, we have Kevin Tian, who is co-founder and CEO of Doppel. Kevin, can you give us a little bit about your background?
Kevin Tian:
Sure. First of all, thank you, Yasamin and Jim for having me. My background is previously before Doppel, I've worked mostly in Silicon Valley, Uber and Lyft, and I'm actually a Georgetown alum, so have been close to the law area for a while now. But yeah, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Doppel and we're building a lot of really cool stuff to support IP holders in marketplaces, surrounding things around IP infringement among NFTs.
Yasamin Parsafar:
Thank you so much and we're really excited to have you on today and for you to share what you guys are doing. To start, Jim, can you give us an overview of the type of infringement that we're seeing in Web3 and particularly with NFTs?
Jim Gatto:
Sure. There's many different types of infringement. I'd say the three main buckets that we're dealing with and we'll talk about probably two of them mostly on this episode, are copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and the right of publicity. With copyright, we're seeing a lot of people creating NFTs based on third party content. Whether it's art or music or movies or clips, any kind of creative work would fall into that category. With trademarks, we're seeing folks use other people's trademarks in connection with either the NFT itself and/or the marketing of an NFT to make it appear as if it's coming from a brand.
Jim Gatto:
Then the third category that we're going to really cover in more detail in another episode, but it's right of publicity. That deals with using someone's name, image or likeness in connection with an NFT without their permission and when you can and cannot do that. That's a whole topic unto itself, so for the most part, we'll cover the copyright and trademark.
Jim Gatto:
The last thing I'll say is that there's really two buckets out there in both of those realms. The first is when someone may rightfully believe or at least have a good faith belief that they have rights to create an NFT around some content and/or use some trademark. One of the well-publicized cases that's going on right now is Quentin Tarantino and Miramax. Quentin Tarantino was involved with Pulp Fiction. He apparently had some sketches or some other content that he believed he actually owned, created some NFTs on it and Miramax sued him, trying to stop the sale of the NFTs, alleging that they had all the distribution rights for Pulp Fiction. There, I think there's probably a good faith dispute because it wasn't like Quentin Tarantino wasn't involved there and he has some belief that the actual content he used, he had rights in.
Jim Gatto:
The more common thing we're seeing is actually just blatant infringement and there's a lot of that. That's where we're probably going to focus most of our efforts in this episode.
Yasamin Parsafar:
Great. Yeah, and so it's really important to detect and police the infringement and enforce your rights as soon as possible. And particularly in this space, we're seeing a lot of scams going on in connection with IP infringement, where a company is pretending to be a big brand owner and asking people to connect their wallets and deposit funds and there's a lot of problems that can arise with that. There's different ways that brand owners can detect infringement and one is the traditional searches that we run, where we can engage a vendor to look for new trademark applications that are being filed worldwide, or to scan for infringing domains.
Yasamin Parsafar:
Now, with Web3, we have a super cool company that we've been working with recently and have successfully worked with them to monitor and detect Web3 infringers, including counterfeiters and scammers that use IP to steal funds. With that being said, Kevin, can you tell us more about Doppel and how you help to identify and monitor infringement in Web3?
Kevin Tian:
At Doppel, especially what we've built is this real time cross-chain monitoring platform for IP infringement. Essentially what we've built underneath the hood is technology where we're constantly streaming new NFTs that are coming on to different platforms, and then quickly checking to see if there is direct infringement, blatant copycatting of original work by different IP holders. The founding team behind this, we all strongly believe in the mission of Doppel because in our view with Web3, with NFTs, there's a lot of exciting potential here. But there's a lot of scammers and people who are impersonating different brands or different blue chip projects that are really hurting the ecosystem and really hurting the community.
Kevin Tian:
For us, we think it's a really exciting thing to be able to build really good technology here that really helps brand holders, IP holders really enforce integrity of the NFTs and the whole ecosystem.
Jim Gatto:
Hey Kevin, can you go a little bit deeper on that as far as how the technology works because I understand that you do a chain scan and you identify the NFTs as they come on. Then how do you from there determine ones that are suspect or likely to be infringing?
Kevin Tian:
The main piece of our algorithm is actually the computer vision side. I think a lot of people start off with keyword matches, but what we found is with pure keyword matches you generate a lot of false positives, you generate a lot of cases that aren't truly scammers or people who are really trying to impersonate other projects maliciously. So we use a combination of the computer vision to handle the actual content. We do also take a look at the metadata, look at the keywords, things like that. From there, we can essentially compute similarity between this brand new NFT and our reference database of original work.
Kevin Tian:
I guess the second question there is how do you cultivate that reference database? That reference database is something that we cultivate directly with our customers. Again, either the IP holder themselves and making sure that we can help protect their assets or maybe the marketplace or the platform where they want to make sure that their marketplace is a safe place for their creators. And their creators can comfortably know that they can create their work on that platform and not worry about people copying their work, impersonating them, and ultimately scamming their community.
Jim Gatto:
And is the computer vision part, is that a digital fingerprinting technique or is it something different?
Kevin Tian:
It's similar. If what you mean by digital fingerprinting is just a simple hash, we don't just do that because that's not sufficient, especially when you're looking at all this dynamic content. It could be GIFs, it could be SVGs, videos. And so we actually do use deep learning models to generate embeddings for each asset.
Jim Gatto:
Got it, great.
Yasamin Parsafar:
Kevin, I know you guys have onboarded Ethereum and a couple other chains. Can you tell us a little bit about what you've done there so far and what are your plans for the future?
Kevin Tian:
Yeah, so right now the focus is Ethereum, Polygon, Solana. We're actually actively working on onboarding Flow as well right now. In terms of our roadmap, our roadmap is basically a combination of two things. One is to just continue to expand the chain coverage that we have and the platform coverage. It's not just sufficient for us to index the chains, but we also have to make sure that we're plugged into the different platforms, whether it's a marketplace, NFT gallery, et cetera, so we can have that higher level data in our system. That's one focus on our roadmap.
Kevin Tian:
The second focus on our roadmap is to then just expand the capabilities that we have in terms of detection and investigations for our end users. Yeah, we get a lot of interesting requests about figuring out who are the people who are trying to scam different users in the ecosystem and figuring out how to identify them and things like that. That's the second piece of our roadmap for these next few months.
Jim Gatto:
We've done a lot of work with Kevin and some of the results that they've produced. Once they identify a potential infringement, can you walk through what the steps are to abate that infringement?
Yasamin Parsafar:
Yeah, before we get into that, I should say one really important piece of IP infringement enforcement in Web3 is to make sure that your portfolio is developed to cover Web3 use. If you're a fashion brand, for example, and your portfolio may cover clothing, it doesn't necessarily cover in terms of your trademark registrations digital assets that represent clothing. We're going to have a separate episode on that sometime in the near future.
Yasamin Parsafar:
Back to your question, once we've detected the infringement, there's different things that we can do. We can utilize the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to send a takedown notice to marketplace or other platforms. We can institute a UDRP proceeding or a Domain Dispute Resolution Proceeding, if the infringing domain is governed by a regulatory body, such as ICANN, that offers proceedings like that. We can send cease and desist letters and in the case of trademark applications that are filed that conflict with our rights, we can file opposition proceedings against those applications.
Jim Gatto:
Great. On the DMCA, I know we've talked about this and we've dealt with this in real life, one of the things that many people commonly do when there's a copyright infringement in an NFT listed on a marketplace, is to send a take down to the marketplace. Doing that is helpful, but it doesn't really disable the NFT. As many of the listeners probably understand, the NFT, there's a token recorded on a blockchain that associates a token ID with a wallet ID and that's what references the ownership by that wallet holder. But the file associated with the NFT typically is not on the blockchain, it's stored somewhere else. In some of the prior cases we've gone after where the file is. One question actually for Kevin first, and I'll come back to you, Yas. Kevin, are you able for your technology to identify the source of where the actual file is stored?
Kevin Tian:
Yeah, we can identify the source and that's all recorded in the blockchain metadata that we're indexing and so we expose that directly.
Jim Gatto:
Once the storage location is determined, what's the process from there?
Yasamin Parsafar:
That's where we can send a takedown notice to have it taken down from where the files are stored. You did bring up a good point where if we have something taken down from just a marketplace—and Kevin's very familiar with this—that person can go and post it in a different marketplace. So the service that they provide where they can often detect who repeat infringers are and who the source is really helpful in determining more aggressive strategies for going after these people who are repeatedly infringing IP. And depending on what jurisdiction they live in, there's all different kinds of strategies that can be implemented there to crack down on somebody who's a repeat infringer.
Jim Gatto:
Kevin, one more question, just to add one more level of technical complexity to this. I know that with NFTs the file can be stored on a central storage, so either under control of a company that's issuing the NFT or a cloud server that they have control over. If you send a DMCA take down notice to them, most of them have responded because they have control, they could take the file down. But the other alternative is that the file could be stored on a decentralized file server such as IPFS. So how does your technology work with something that's stored on a decentralized server?
Kevin Tian:
Yeah, I mean, it's the blessing and curse of Web3. You have these centralized systems that are resistant to having a centralized user being able to manage it. I mean, from our perspective, we will surface the ultimate location of this file, whether it is on a decentralized file system like IPFS or not. But I think in terms of the enforcement side, that's actually where I'll defer to Yas in terms of what is possible there or not.
Yasamin Parsafar:
Yeah, those are things that we need to look at on a case-by-case basis, depending on what's involved. The facts of all these are going to vary, including with respect to blockchain domains that are not regulated, or there's currently no process like a UDRP for disputing infringing use of a domain. This is where we work with our clients, depending on the facts of each situation, to come up with the best strategies that take into account their business needs and goals. It's a really developing and fun area to work with.
Jim Gatto:
Yas, I know with some of the decentralized file storage systems like IPFS, it really requires just digging down a little bit more into the technology. I mean, there's gateways, I know some of the IPFS gateways have DMCA policies and they've been compliant. There's also this process of pinning files with respect to IPFS and sometimes you can get a file unpinned. Some of these techniques may not be 100% effective, but it makes it more difficult in some cases for infringers. I think digging deeper into that could be another whole episode.
Jim Gatto:
But I think the main takeaway for this episode is that in order to truly disable an NFT, taking it down from a marketplace typically is not sufficient and if you get the file taken down from either stored on a centralized server, get it taken down from there, basically the NFT metadata will point to an empty file or a location where there is no file and you effectively disable the NFT. So the user may still have the token associated with their wallet, but it doesn't reference anything so it becomes worthless. To truly effectively abate infringement, that's really one of the effective things on the copyright side.
Jim Gatto:
With things that are decentralized storage through like IPFS, the challenge is that you don't have the file stored on a single location under control of a single entity. That's what centralized storage is. The fact it may be distributed, it may be on multiple servers or in some cases with IPFS, the file is actually broken up and parts of it are stored on different servers and there's not just a file ID, but there's a content identifier, a content ID and it's not just a location ID, like a URL or a URI that might exist with a central server. So it goes a little bit deeper there, and we've done some work there, but just wanted to flag for folks that if you're dealing with an NFT with a file that's stored on a decentralized server, you just need to dig deeper and it's a little more challenging.
Yasamin Parsafar:
Yeah, especially because there's international and jurisdictional issues involved there, depending on where everything is located.
Jim Gatto:
Right and so one of the other things, you mentioned a little bit about UDRP. Can you maybe just talk through that at a very high level as far as what that process entails?
Yasamin Parsafar:
Yeah, it's actually both dealing with copyright and trademark infringements with NFTs because we're seeing a lot of people use a brand's name, one of their trademarks to market and sell their own NFTs or even pretending there's some kind of airdrop or promotion going on under the name of the brand to get people to connect wallets. That's a big issue there and we've dealt with that as well with the infringing domains and we have been able to use the UDRP process where we file a complaint against the infringing domain in order to get the domain transferred to the brand owner. It's one way to do that out of court, if you just want the infringing website shut down and on top of that, having the domain transferred to the brand owner, the UDRP process is much cheaper and faster than going through court.
Jim Gatto:
Got it. Kevin, one other question for you. You mentioned monitoring metaverses, so as opposed to marketplaces, are there any significant differences in the kinds of information or the process to identify NFTs if they're associated with a particular metaverse, for example?
Kevin Tian:
I wouldn't say so. I mean, I think from our perspective again, we do both the combination of indexing what's on the chain and that's great because that's ultimately the source of truth for all these different platforms. And then we do work on integrations to hook into a marketplace or metaverse et cetera. So from our perspective, at least so far, there hasn't been a big difference between the two.
Jim Gatto:
Great. Yas, any other thoughts or suggestions for folks looking to enforce their IP in connection with NFTs?
Yasamin Parsafar:
Yes, my suggestions would be to consult with us so that we can strengthen your portfolio both domestically and internationally to cover Web3 use cases. Also, we can work with Doppel to help detect and enforce IP in Web3. Great. Kevin, any other thoughts you have before we wrap up the episode?
Kevin Tian:
No, I mean, I think it's just a very exciting space to be in right now. There's a lot of green field developments going on, both on the tech side and on the legal side. Yeah, thank you again for having me and super excited to just continue to work with you guys.
Jim Gatto:
Great, same here. Actually, one more question. You mentioned developers with technology. I think one of the things that I've seen a little bit of an uptick in recently, speaking of developments of technology, is dynamic NFTs where NFTs can be programmatically designed based on changing events or circumstances to actually change the NFT. It could be a change to the metadata and/or the actual image associated with the NFT. We've seen this in, for example, use cases like blockchain games, you could have a NFT based avatar that has, based on the metadata, certain characteristics, but as you use it and acquire skill, as data gets fed in, it can unlock traits and you could change the image from, let's say a newbie avatar to one that represents whatever skill that may have been unlocked. It seems to me that if the NFT image is changing, is that something you guys can detect with your technology?
Kevin Tian:
It is. I mean, it makes things a little more complex. We actually saw this most recently with the NBA, The Association NFT collection, where in the very initial stage it just had a default picture and then over time it turned into all the different player photos once the playoffs were settled. Basically on our end, what we just have to do is we constantly just recheck data. We constantly recheck metadata, asset data for different NFTs and from there are able to recompute whether something has changed about the NFT so that it's now an infringement. But yeah, basically we have to constantly recheck the state of certain NFTs to make sure we have the latest copy.
Jim Gatto:
Yeah, it's pretty cool because I know that there's both legitimate and illegitimate uses of dynamic NFT. People are changing content without the owner knowing it is not necessarily part of the original plan. But there are some legitimate and bona fide uses and I think it's going to add an additional level of complexity to infringement enforcement. Also, this is not necessarily on topic, but it relates a little bit, is when we're drafting NFT owner licenses, you have to anticipate what the content can be and that it will account in the license. But again, we're going to cover that in another episode, but I think this has been great. Kevin, thank you very much.
Yasamin Parsafar:
No, I just wanted to say, Kevin again, thanks for joining. I really enjoy working with you and really look forward to continuing to work with you as this space and your technology develops. Really excited about that. Thank you so much.
Kevin Tian:
Thank you for having me.
Yasamin Parsafar:
And thanks to all our listeners for joining us on our podcast today and we look forward to having you with us again soon.
Jim Gatto:
Thanks, all.
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