 Hello everyone. This is Trademarks in the Metaverse, new opportunities and challenges. So first I'd like to say thanks for letting me crash the party by way of introduction. I'm a lawyer. I'm Chief Brand Counsel for the Linux Foundation. So what does that mean? I help the Linux Foundation protect its trademarks and the trademarks of all the projects that we host and the marks for our events like this. I'm a US-based attorney. So pretty much everything I'll be talking about today is based on US law. In some specific situations, I'll be talking about laws in other countries but I'll flag that when I do. And one of the other things that I do is I serve on the International Trademark Association's Emerging Issues Committee. A couple housekeeping items. While I am a lawyer, I'm not your lawyer. So today's presentation is not legal advice. You may not rely upon it as such. This presentation does not necessarily represent the views of the Linux Foundation or projects that we host or into. So I mentioned into. I'm just not expanding on my resume to impress you as I'm sure that does. The reason I mentioned into is the Emerging Issues Committee has various subcommittees and I serve on the new Emerging Issues Committee. So that means we're tasked with examining issues on the very front line that might be relevant to trademarks. Sometimes we look at something and there's just simply nothing to look at and it goes away. Other times we have to take a deeper dive. And this was one of those situations. The Interborder of Directors asked us last year to investigate trademarks and the metaverse. Our subcommittee produced a report on this which was released last month. I would say go and check it out. You're more than welcome to but the target audience really is trademark lawyers. But the reason that I'm here today is that the exercise of researching the topic discussing it with a various number of people and then writing up this report is I do think there are some things that are worthwhile sharing with with this audience. And just so I have a sense I'd like to get a little better understanding of this audience. So are there any lawyers in the room? Okay. Good. Are there developers in the room? Excellent. Okay. All right. That's helpful. And I know we have at least one marketing professional. So that kind of checks my three boxes of who I thought I was going to be speaking with today. All right. So we're going to talk about trademarks in the metaverse. But I do need to kind of lay the groundwork on the trademark side of things. So I'm going to run through some specific topics about trademarks and trademark law that are going to be important in the second half of the discussion. So I'll try to be as quick as I can, but also keep it interesting. One thing that we discovered in the process of putting together the inter-report is that at the conceptual level it seems pretty straightforward. It's like, yeah, people are going to use trademarks in the metaverse and you should protect them. And that all makes sense. Once we started getting into the details of how exactly that would work, it got very complicated very quickly, which isn't really a surprise when you get into any new technology. So things that I'm going to cover first, goods and services, classification, use as a trademark, and then a couple additional issues, jurisdiction, enforcement, and trademark licenses. Okay. So trademark law protects marks. That seems straightforward enough, but that's wrong. Trademark law protects marks that are used to identify and distinguish his or her goods from those manufactured or sold by others and to indicate the source of those goods. That's straight from the U.S. trademark statute. So unless you're Coca-Cola or McDonald's or a few other famous mark owners, trademark rights extend to two things. It's not just the mark, it's the mark as it's used with the offering of a particular good or service. And the point of it all is the mark indicates the source of that service. So remember that this is a, trademarks are a valuable intellectual property right. It's also a consumer protection act. This is all about consumers making sure that they can understand what it is that they're purchasing. But I think this concept that it's the mark with specific goods and services, I think it's fairly intuitive. So on the one hand, you can have one company use a mark Delta in connection with air transportation services at the same time you can have another company using Delta in connection with plumbing fixtures. Nobody is confused by this. And why would they? The offering of air transportation services and plumbing fixtures have nothing to do with each other. And the marketplace understands that. So that's where the goods and services really come into play. These are examples of the U.S. trademark registrations for the two Delta marks. And you'll see there it identifies the mark. It then identifies what the claimed goods are. So there you'll see four and air transportation of passengers, mail and express freight and cargo. And then it also identifies a class and we'll get to that in a minute. I'm not sure why this keeps blacking out on me. So you'll see there class 39 and it's too small to read, but that also identifies a class 13, I think it is. So classification, you have the entire world of goods and services. It became very clear pretty early on in national trademark registration systems that this needed to be organized in some way. So 1957, enter the Nice classification system. It's officially called the Nice agreement concerning the international classification of goods and services for the purposes of the registration of marks. People just call it the Nice classification system. It's an international treaty that divides the universe of goods and services into currently 45 classes of goods and services. It has been modified over time. There's a meeting every, I believe it's three years where they work on revisions to the classification system. So new goods and services come into existence. They talk about where to classify it. And occasionally they add new classes to the classification system. Roughly 150 countries, which is basically approaching all of them, four regional trademark offices, so like the EU IP office and WIPO, all use the Nice classification system for their trademark applications and registrations. A key point there on the last one is it's required to participate in the Madrid protocol, which is an international filing system for trademarks. Madrid protocol is a whole separate subject that we won't get into, but it is a kind of a powerful influence. And Canada amended their trademark act in 2019 in part to adopt the Nice classification system, which it had not been using, just so it could join the Madrid protocol. Okay, so for the classes, this is an example of class nine from the WIPO website. You can see it has the full listing of classes, one through 34 goods, 35 through 45 or services. And then it tells you what falls into each classification. Now how it's used varies from country to country. So some countries allow a class heading claim, which means you can file a trademark application for your mark in class nine. And that's all that you have to say. Other countries like the United States require very specific descriptions of the goods and services that you're claiming that you use your trademark with. And it's also used when trademark applications are examined. So some trademark offices, not all will examine an application on relative grounds. So what that means is not only will they evaluate the application just to make sure that everything is in order. But they will also look at their register to see if there's any other confusingly similar trademarks that might conflict with your application. Now where the classification system comes into play there is some countries are only going to look at the class you identified in your application. So if you apply in class nine, they're only going to look in class nine. Other jurisdictions will look at related classes as well. So class nine covers software, for example, class 42 covers hosted software. So they will look in both of those. Okay, moving on, use. Use is a key concept in trademark law. It really doesn't make sense to protect something that's supposed to indicate the source of a good or a service if the owner isn't using it in the marketplace. So this, it's a little small, but all of this here is the US definition of use. And it's key to point out, it isn't simply simply just using it. It's using it as a trademark. So putting a sign over a bushel of apples and saying apple one dollar is not a trademark use of the word apple. What that is is describing to people what it is that's in the bushel. So descriptive uses like that are not trademark uses. It describes what the good is not the source. Putting an apple design on the back of my laptop is a trademark use. It's telling consumers who made this laptop. Now the hard part is that use comes up in various contexts when we're talking about trademarks and every country approaches it in their own way. So it could come up in a registration context. So you apply to register a mark. The United States, for example, requires you to demonstrate to them through evidence that you are using the mark with the goods and services claimed in the application as a trademark. It comes up at renewal time. Some countries require evidence, so you don't have to demonstrate use when you obtain a registration, but you keep that registration at renewal. You have to provide evidence of that use to convince them that you're still actually using the mark. And it comes up in enforcement context. So it either can be a purely defensive one where someone is trying to cancel your trademark rights where they think you're not using it as a trademark and you have to provide evidence and support of that. It can also come up in a counterclaim. If I sue somebody for trademark infringement, they're going to come after me and say prove that you're actually using your trademark and that you have trademark rights. All right. I think this is close to the being done with the trademark basics, and then we'll get into some metaverse stuff. And we'll cover more on these later. So key point that a lot of people forget. Trademark rights are national in scope. If I have a trademark right in Canada, that does not do me any good in Finland. Now there's some gray area around that if you can prove that the user infringer in Finland was aware of your trademark rights in Canada and that's why they started using it. But basically speaking, your trademark rights are national. What that means is it's expensive to register trademarks worldwide. I mean, most companies don't do it worldwide because of that cost, but everyone finds their appropriate comfort zone that gives them the appropriate level of coverage at a reasonable cost. Trademark rights are enforced in national trademark offices and courts. If I want to stop something that's going on in Sweden, I have to hire a Swedish lawyer to oppose that application in Sweden or I have to hire that Swedish lawyer to go to a court in Sweden. However, there's also the secondary enforcement mechanism, which I'd say the last 15 years has become just as important and that's the trademark abuse policies. So for domain names, we have the uniform dispute resolution policy. You register a domain name with most top level domains. You're agreeing to be subject to this arbitration policy where if a brand owner thinks you were infringing their trademark, I can go to WIPO or one of the other arbitrators and file a complaint. Social media platforms all have trademark abuse policies. So if somebody has registered a GitHub repo that incorporates my trademark and it's confusing users, I can go to GitHub and file a complaint and say, hey, here's my trademark registration. This is confusing people and GitHub will take action on that as a service provider. Okay. So let me actually just pause there for a second because we're going to transition now into some metaverse specific stuff. Any questions on what I've talked about so far? Okay. Great. All right. Trademarks and the metaverse is a great opportunity, right? So new ways to market and sell existing goods and services. As we were working on our interview report in our research, we saw an application that was filed by McDonald's and, you know, deciphering what they were claiming in that application. It's clear what they are thinking about is an avatar sitting in a virtual cafe where its user orders a coffee that is delivered in the physical world to them as they're interacting on the metaverse platform. It's like it's not a new good. Anyone can get a coffee from McDonald's, but it's a new way of getting and marketing that good. You can create new virtual counterparts to existing goods and services. I think this is the most obvious one when you're talking about physical goods. So clothing, shoes, cars create virtual counterparts of those and market those metaverse platforms. An early example of this was the Birken handbags and it was actually the first example of litigation over the use of trademark goods in the metaverse. We'll come back to that a bit later. You can create entirely new goods and services on a metaverse platform. I don't insert idea here of whatever you'll need in the metaverse that doesn't exist in the physical world. And also just expands the geographic scope of brand awareness. So you have a very popular brand in one part of the country and even with the internet, it just doesn't have brand awareness in other parts of the world. What you can do on a metaverse platform is attract new potential purchasers of goods and services who could be based anywhere. So challenges. Now we're getting into the fun stuff. So there are many. All right. So we protect trademarks through registration. You do generate some trademark rights just by using a mark more in common law countries like the United States. But for the most part, let's just say the best way to protect a trademark is through registration. Well, what are the goods and services for this thing that you're doing on the metaverse platform? And where do you apply to register the trademark then? Again, we talked about different use requirements from country to country. What does it mean to use a mark on a metaverse platform? And does it align with every country's requirements for that? License arrangements. So there's a lot of uncertainty in how much controlled technology is going to support, especially platform to platform. So when a brand owner licenses its trademark to another, it has to control the quality and the nature of the goods and services that are offered under their mark. We're going to talk about that a bit more, but this is kind of a dual challenge and opportunity. I think from what I hear about the technology being developed for use in connection with the metaverse, there's going to be some opportunities there for technological controls rather than pure contractual and legal controls. That said, that's all future looking and brand owners don't know where that's going to land. And then enforcement, of course. So if I see somebody who's infringing my mark in a virtual world, where do I go? What form do I use? What country do I go to? What's the standard for evidence in that country? Can I even identify the relevant consumer who's going to be confused by this? If the experience on a particular metaverse platform may vary from user to user depending on certain inputs. All right. So we're going to dive into these in a bit more detail. So brand owners likely need new trademark registrations to protect their marks. And you might say, well, wait a second, like especially in the case of physical good, why do I need a registration for a corresponding virtual good? It's like, well, I don't know. You might. Where we are right now is we just don't have guidance on this. To me, it seems intuitive that trademark rights in a physical world good would extend to a corresponding virtual world good. And that the MetaBurken's case was the first test of this. And there the answer was yes. But in that case, I think it was pretty obvious they were near exact replicas of the physical world handbags. But as you move further and further away from exact replicas, where's the line of artistic expression? It's just a different good now. And it doesn't extend to that. Courts have not had the opportunity to give any guidance on that yet. So as brand owners, you really don't know. So brand owners are going to want to register trademarks to cover these new activities that they're doing on MetaBurken's platforms. So that seems simple enough, right? Just draft up some applications. It's never that simple. So first challenge is, all right, so we've got virtual goods. What class is that going to go into? That's probably the largest area of disagreement. And I would say after working on the International Trademark Association report with our core group of authors, and then the other trademark lawyers we spoke with, there's no alignment on this. That said, the EU IPO has come out and said, all right, if it's a virtual good, it's going into class nine since it's digital content, right? You're getting software that is creating the thing that you're seeing. The USPTO said, yeah, that's probably right. We'll go with that unless it's online, non-downloadable. Now, I would say if I'm on a Metaverse platform, pick one of your choice. And particularly if it has an online component to it, how am I going to know if it's downloadable content, if it's streaming content, if it's terminology online, non-downloadable content, and set a different way. If I'm a brand owner and I know my company is working on that, how am I going to know which technological approach they're going to be taking to all of this? Knowing that it's going to take three years for a trademark application to proceed to registration. So everyone's kind of flying blind here. And particularly, you know, one thing about the guidance from the trademark offices, my personal view is this is wrong. Class nine is probably the most bloated international class there is. So it covers software, it covers electronic and computer hardware, it covers lab equipment, eyeglasses, fire extinguishers, life-saving training mannequins. All of this is in class nine. I mean, just software alone is probably too broad, given where we are now from everything that falls under the definition of software. What's an alternative to that? One approach would be, well, you classify it according to its corresponding real-world class. I think that works for some, but not all, of potential offerings of goods and services. Maybe you need entirely new class. The treaty participants have created new classes over time. This might be a time to add another one. So I don't have an answer for you, but I don't agree with the initial guidance that we're getting from the trademark offices. So I expect that to change over time. Okay. So we need new registrations to cover the activities. Let's draft the applications. You know, there's a lot of uncertainty. But you know, one good question is, well, where are you going to apply? Because it doesn't make sense to register a mark in one jurisdiction and all your use is in another jurisdiction. But we've got two layers here, right? We have users existing in a physical world who are subject to national laws, and we have metaverse platforms who cross these borders quite freely. So figuring out where you're going to invest your money to register these trademarks is a challenge. Now, one approach that I think a lot of people may be defaulting to is, well, where's the company who is operating the metaverse platform that I'm going to be using? Where are they based? And I'll apply to register there because most likely, if there's an issue, I'm going to go to that platform operator first. I think that makes a lot of sense. And frankly, I think that's the way that a lot of people are going to think about it. But my understanding is that there's a lot of desire, especially among, you know, participants in this event, of creating interoperability across platforms. And so that may kind of undercut the value of that approach. So maybe it just means you need to file in multiple jurisdictions, depending where all the platform operators are. That could be an approach. But again, nobody, everyone is just guessing now, which is costing money. And I think that's really, you know, where it's relevant. The last point, too, I think is an important one because I've had these discussions with examiners at the Trademark Office. So a principle in trademark law is you may register one trademark in a registration. Okay, so if the technical specifications of a platform, if they differ, if it doesn't support what your logo looks like in the physical world, and you need to create a new one that complies with those technical specifications, am I going to apply to register just how it appears on that Metaverse platform? Maybe, again, that might be the solution there. You're just going to have to spend the money. But again, I keep coming back to that. You see the multiplying factor here is if you've got five different marks and want to protect it in 10 different countries, and it's $2,000 to $5,000 per mark per month, then you're going to have to register for that. And that's $5,000 to $5,000 per mark per country to get a registration. We're talking really serious dollars. Okay, so you remember before we talked about use, and here is just not enough guidance. And, you know, this isn't, I'm not assessing blame here. It's just we're early like, and so brand owners are guessing. So when you apply to register a mark, and it's going to be for virtual good in the United States, and you're going to have to show that the mark is in use in commerce in the United States, and they're telling you it has to be labeled as downloadable software in class nine. Well, how am I going to show that? How am I going to prove to the US PTO? What are their standards for acceptance of that declaration of use that says PTO? Here's my mark being used with the goods I claimed in my application. We don't have that guidance yet. And I can tell you right now, as somebody who represents open source projects, the PTO struggles with anything that isn't a box you take off of a shelf and go to a cash register and pay for it. So marks for open source projects where we have to find a download button somewhere, because that is the only thing that the US PTO examiners understand. You can imagine trying to show them the purchase point for a virtual good on a metaverse platform, how that's going to work. Not well. But again, it varies country to country. We talked about this earlier. How do you prove use in China for the for these same virtual goods to defend against the non-use cancellation action? In China, they use the niche classification system, but then they have their own sub classification system under that. So you basically check boxes of standard descriptions which don't really align necessarily with the good. So you check boxes that are anywhere near what exactly it is that you're offering. But then somebody could attempt to cancel your registration saying, well, you're not using it with that. So how do I prove in a court in China that I am in fact using my mark in connection with these virtual goods in China? And the Chinese courts want to see China specific evidence. And it comes up, as I said, in renewal. So I have to renew my registration in the Philippines. They again want to see evidence of use in the Philippines of a virtual good. How am I going to show that? I don't have answers for you. But I do want to flag these problems because I think these are problems that we are going to need to solve. Sure. Could you just grab a mic so the virtual people can hear the question? Oh, that's a great question. So the answer is probably it depends. But for the most part, I would lean towards yes, because trademark law doesn't care who creates it. It cares who uses it. And so how if AI platform is creating a logo, and then a legal entity, a person, a partnership, a corporation is using it in connection with the offering of a good or a service. That's a trademark. And they're the ones who are using it. So they own those trademark rights. So I would say in that case, yeah, I mean, I think it would. Now, with logos, if it's creating a logo, you still have copyright issues. And copyright is where the real question is. But in the case of, well, can I own the trademark? It's actually probably the downside of AI developed content doesn't hurt as much in this case, right? Because who is going to, who's going to be complaining about it? Because I don't think people will be interested in the copyright rights in the logo as much as they would in the trademark rights. But yeah, very related topic. There's a lot going on in the AI space as well. Okay, trademark licenses. This one is it's, it's going to be messy in the sense that it's a lot of work. And a lot of adverse parties are going to have to talk to each other. So license or licensee. So standard trademark license, you identify certain things, what marks are licensed to the licensee, what goods and services are licensed to the licensee, which jurisdictions, sometimes it's worldwide, sometimes it's regional, sometimes it's state to state or province to province. So that's all set out set forth in the registration. All current trademark agreement, trademark license agreements, unless they're just really broad and it's basically everything everywhere. They're not going to cover use in the metaverse. And, or if, if perhaps the license agreement does, you still need the license or and licensee to agree that yes, it does before the license or goes out and re licenses the same mark in connection with virtual goods. And the licensee thought they already had the right to that. So, you know, the challenge is you're going to have to define all this. So what's the mark, you know, we talked about that it may actually be different platform to platform. What are the goods and services, you know, you're going to have to define that. But I think one interesting part here is, you know, trademark owners must control the quality of the goods and services with which their mark is used. So that's not trademark owners should control. It's a good idea. It's must. If a trademark owner doesn't control the quality of the goods and services with which their mark is used and how their marks are displayed, it invalidates the trademark. It's called a naked license. So remember, a trademark is that something that signifies to the relevant consumer the unique source of a good or a service. If a licensee is out there doing whatever they want with your trademark, consumers don't know who's the real source anymore. It's not a trademark anymore. That invalidates the trademark rights. Now, I mentioned earlier, you know, one upside is it's like, well, wait a second. I can supply the digital files that is my mark. I can put blockchain technology on this to make sure that it's only displayed where I want it to be displayed. I can do geographic restrictions where it might be a license worldwide, but it's only displayed in certain markets for certain reasons. That is if the tools are there and ideally they're at least similar tools cross platforms. Those tools will also be helpful slash required for regulated industries. So pharmaceuticals, for example, it's really hard to get a trademark for a pharmaceutical that is available where it has the same name worldwide. There's often jurisdiction specific names for drugs. So if you're marketing them on a metaverse platform, obviously you're not using them again. I don't know, maybe you are. You're going to have to restrict markets where you don't have those trademark rights. In fact, you may be prohibited from using your mark in a specific jurisdiction. All right, so covering trademark enforcement, everything that we talked about so far is important because the first thing that comes up in any trademark dispute, if I'm receiving a complaint or a cease and desist letter, first thing I'm doing is, well, who sent it to me and do they have trademark rights? Because if they don't have trademark rights, this discussion is over. So everything we talked about about having enforceable trademark rights is going to be the first question that any defendant's going to ask and is going to be important to this analysis. But then there's the question of evidence. So I see somebody on a metaverse platform using a mark a certain way. I think it infringes my trademark rights. Well, that's great that you think that. How are you going to prove it and where are you going to prove it? What is the data that's available that tells you where the mark was displayed in the real world? Because again, if I'm suing somebody in a Canadian court, we can only be talking about Canadian use. How am I going to identify what users are seeing it? So if a platform has the ability to change who sees or experiences a trademark on a specific platform, how am I going to show that the relevant consumer is likely to be confused if I can't even show who the relevant consumer is in that particular place and if they did see it? And also just from an evidence gathering, how am I going to replicate the experience of, you know, I'm not going to have the same, my avatar won't have the same metadata that the relevant consumer will necessarily. So as a lawyer, how am I going to gather that evidence if I can't replicate the experience that they're having? All very complicated questions. And then, you know, we've talked about this. All right, so you've got evidence. You know you have enforceable rights. I'm going to sue them. Well, where? Where are you going to sue them? And are you going to go to a court or are you going to go to a Metaverse platform operator? You know, are they going to have their own trademark dispute mechanisms in place? My guess is probably likely. You know, same as social media platforms. But what if the infringement is on multiple platforms? Well, then I have to go to all of them. That may be where we end up. But what if an international organization is established, you know, similar to ICAN, to create enforced uniform rules? You know, it doesn't pass the experience with, you know, the worldwide web and other things. I think saying that, oh, well, the, you know, private companies are they're going to decide the rules for these, you know, valuable intellectual property rights, and we'll just roll with that. And there's going to be multiple ones. My guess is that's probably not the end point. So I think some type of regulation is coming. I don't know what exactly it looks like, but something to keep in mind, you know, as you're working in this space. Okay, takeaways. You know, great opportunity, absolutely, but significant costs to protect trademarks in this, in this area. I think the biggest takeaway really is, you know, at the beginning asked, you know, who is here, lawyers, developers, product people, and marketing folks. I think there needs to be a lot more communication among those three groups, you know, on this specific topic. You know, lawyers, you know, what is marketing thinking about? What opportunities do they see? Even if it's not possible, what are they thinking about? And what are the product and dev teams talking about? What do they actually see, you know, in their pipeline for the next year, the next five years, the next 10 years? Marketing folks, can legal take steps now to protect these future ideas? It's going to take me two to three to five years to get you a trademark registration to protect whatever it is you're thinking about. Can we get started on that now? Can the product team implement the ideas that marketing is thinking about? Maybe, maybe not, but it's early, like we can help, you know, kind of shape requirements. You know, developers help the legal and marketing team understand the roadmap, even if it's purely conceptual. I think every conversation is going to lead to more and more good ideas. I think another thing, you know, we've mentioned it a couple of times, is the interoperability and cross-platform standards and communication protocols. I think that's going to be big, and I think that's what's really attractive here, is if it's, if not seamless, at least, you know, convenient, because I think that generates the real business opportunity. And it also helps, you know, narrow down how many different things we need to think about to protect the brands, if we know that it can move platform to platform. And the other thing I would say is, I think, you know, let the creativity run wild, you know, when we're talking about what the metaverse means and what it could be and what it will be. But I think we're not going to get rid of the real world, right? There are national borders and national laws that have to be followed. That's not going away. So we have to figure out how they can work with each other. And I think that's all that I had. That is. So one, thank you. And two, questions, comments, feedback? I'd love to hear it. Sure. You can just grab the mic. Yeah, I have another question. So when we talk about the metaverse, that's one metaverse for the global world. And if I created some virtual goods in the metaverse, and where shall I register my trademark? I mean, which country? Right. Yeah. So I mean, I think that's the situation where, you know, particularly where you don't previously have a corresponding physical world good. If this is either just a brand new type of good or service, or you exist purely as a company that offers goods and services in the metaverse. So, you know, where do you register? I mean, you kind of have to look to secondary inputs. So where is your company physically located? You know, I start there as an option. Whoever operates the metaverse platform, I would say that's a perhaps even more important jurisdiction. Because if you need to enforce your rights and you're going to go to that platform operator, they won't necessarily be required, but they're going to be more comfortable with a registration from their own jurisdiction because they understand it. Beyond that, I mean, it's, you're kind of guessing. So, you know, where are your users? Where are your consumers? And you kind of, you know, it's the same analysis you would for any other trademark for any other good. It's just that on a, you know, in this new virtual world, mapping that to these national boundaries is not straightforward at all. And, you know, a lot of people would say, like, oh, it's just like the internet, though. It kind of isn't, though. I don't really know how best to articulate it. Other than one thing is that I think the internet did consider a number of these questions. And that's why you do have things like the UDRP. And there are international conventions for how brands are used on the internet. So now the thing is the cost multiplier, right? You know, because you, you know, the most conservative approach is we'll just register it everywhere, then you're covered. Well, that's cost prohibitive. There's no way you're doing that. So you're not doing 200 countries, you're not doing 100 countries, probably not doing 50, probably not 20. So do you have a top 10 list of countries? Even that, you know, you're approaching six digits in cost. So, you know, maybe you have to cut that down to two or three, especially if there's multiple marks. It's finding that right balance, which I think is going to vary from applicant to applicant. Hopefully this isn't a dumb question, but why are trademarks so expensive? And what does that money, where does it go? What does it fund? And are there opportunities for open source or nonprofit projects to pay less in this realm? So the last part is probably the easiest to answer, which is to say from the government perspective, no, they don't differentiate nonprofits or individual applicants. You know, on the patent side, they do have small entities where the fee structure is lower. Trademarks is it's based on how many classes of goods or services are in your application for your mark. So if it's one mark in two classes, you pay $650 to the US government for that. You then require a lawyer like me to actually file the application. Some jurisdictions, the US, although I think they're moving away from this, do allow prosa applications where a non-lawyer files it on their own behalf. But in most jurisdictions, you need somebody licensed in that country to file the application. Now that is one, theoretically, upside of the Madrid protocol that I mentioned earlier, that international filing system. There often is an initial cost savings there because you're cutting out the local counsel. So you file locally, you check a box for other countries. The applications are sent there through WIPO. But if the National Trademark Office who receives it raises any issues, you then need local counsel to respond to the issues. So my experience, particularly in software, is Madrid protocol ends up not being the savings that is advertised to be. Other, if I'm selling jewelry, the class in the description is just jewelry. And so it's not complex. And those applications go through quite nicely. And you do experience that cost savings. So what does the money go to? It's running the National Trademark Office. Some of those fees go to organizations like WIPO. And then it's the legal fees associated with preparing and filing the application and tracking it, all that stuff on an international basis. We're cheaper than patents, though. I will say that. So on an IP rate to IP rate, trademarks to our bargain. So I got a question. Yeah, I mean, copyright, it's, yeah, it's actually, I don't even remember what the costs are. It's really cheap to apply to register a copyright. Although with software, it's a hassle because it's, you know, by the time you file it, you then have to file it again with your deposit copies. So it's a frequent exercise with copyright registrations. So I got a question for you. Yep. And it's more of an opinion piece, but I think you'll enjoy it. So imagine, and this is a realistic thing that can happen. Say I've got a character that I built with a red fedora, pink jumpsuit, fluffy bunny shoes, and, you know, a white, it's a very unique, strange look. Yep. But I've managed to amass a half a billion people who watch and come to my world. How do you propose that person tries to protect the likeness, even though none of the assets are unique, but the combination of the assets are what's unique. Yeah, exactly. So there I would say, and again, this is important to differentiate the different types of IP. The copyright claims there, I think are harder. To me, that's a pretty straightforward, valid trademark. The trade dress of kind of if the look is consistent, and it is functioning as a source identifier. So if I see your character walking around, it's like, there's royal. All right. Like, let's hear a speech. It's functioning as a source identifier. So it's a trademark and protectable. Now, I will say things like, you know, the presentation of a costume. Trademark law does make those higher standards. So it's not inherently distinctive where it is automatically protectable. You're going to have to prove to the trademark office that it has acquired distinctiveness and provide evidence of that acquired distinctiveness. So your 500,000 followers is probably exhibit a and, you know, showing how that's connected with whatever services you're claiming. And then the scope of protection is going to be pretty narrow, right? So it's, you're not going to, you wouldn't be covering the color pink for your shoes. It's the specific look. The question is that what threshold? I'm building my community and I get first 100,000 and somebody decides I'm going to dress like that. Yep. And then you keep on going to get a half a billion. Right. And so the conceptual issue you're talking about is something that trademark law has dealt with forever, right? So how many units sold is enough to show use in commerce? Well, if I'm building an aircraft carrier, one is enough, right? But if it's a matchbox car, well, then I'm going to need 20,000 units sold. And, you know, unfortunately, it's one of those, well, I'll tell you when I see it, examples, it's, you know, whatever that particular court feels is the right number. But yes, there, you're not going to be able to pinpoint a threshold. There's going to be gray area. So I'd say get far past that gray area, and then you'll be confident. But good question. All right. Well, thank you, everyone.