The Advertising Law Blog provides commentary and news on developing legal issues in advertising, promotional marketing, Internet, and privacy law. This blog is sponsored by the Advertising, Marketing & Promotions group at Olshan. The practice is geared to servicing the needs of the advertising, promotional marketing, and digital industries with a commitment to providing personal, efficient and effective legal service.
Happy holidays! We hope you are safe and healthy. As we enter the new year, Olshan’s Advertising and Branding law groups shares their list of hot topics that look to be on the horizon for 2022. If you have any questions on these or other issues, please reach out to us.
Non-fungible tokens or “NFTs” are projected to continue to grow as an integral part of branding strategies during 2022. NFTs are unique and verifiable digital assets that, like cryptocurrency, are stored on a digital ledger or “blockchain” (such as Ethereum) and can be traded via online platforms that support NFTs (such as OpenSea). Unlike cryptocurrency that can be traded or exchanged one-for-one with a like kind (i.e., one bitcoin equals another bitcoin), each NFT contains a digital signature that renders it “non-fungible” or one-of-a-kind. NFTs are generally digital representations of real-world items such as music, audio, video, text and art. NFTs first garnered widespread media coverage in March 2021 when the artist Beeple sold an NFT representing a collage of 5,000 digital images at auction at Christie’s for over $69 million.