Daily LInks
1. Amazon loses bid to toss consumer antitrust lawsuit: Amazon.com Inc must face consumer claims that its pricing practices artificially drove up the cost of goods sold by other retailers in violation of U.S. antitrust law, a federal judge has ruled. – Read More on Reuters
2. Deep Agency shows the perils of applying AI to the fashion industry: Companies commercializing diffusion models have long claimed that “fair use” protects them if their systems were trained on licensed content, but artists allege that the models infringe on their rights, in part because the training data was sourced without their authorization or consent. – Read More on TechCrunch
3. Gucci and Yuga Labs Are Bringing High Fashion to the Otherside: Fashion company Gucci said Monday that it’s working with non-fungible-token issuer Yuga Labs, the company behind the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection, to bring luxury digital fashion into the metaverse. – Read More on CoinDesk
4. Why Chinese Apps Are the Favorites of Young Americans: Much like during China’s rise to manufacturing dominance a few decades ago, Chinese tech companies have harnessed a labor pool of affordable talent to constantly fine-tune product features. – Read More on the WSJ
5. Mixed report on Fashion Charter signatories: CPD data showed that less than half of signatories – 45% – were currently compliant with setting public climate targets needed to keep global warming below 1.5C in line with the Paris Agreement. – Read More on EcoTextile
6. Are Celebrity Brands Out of Style for Retailers? While the relationships with Ye and Beyoncé didn’t pan out as expected, it’s worth noting the common factor in both partnerships — Adidas. More specifically, these failed collaborations shed light into a bigger issue with the brand: its heavy dependency on collabs with various partners. – Read More on PYMNTS
1. Adobe, Nvidia AI imagery systems aim to resolve copyright questions: Two Silicon Valley companies on Tuesday announced new tools that use artificial intelligence to generate images while tackling some of the thorniest legal issues surrounding the technology: copyrights and payments. – Read More on Reuters
2. What a Ban on TikTok in the US Could Mean for Brands and Retailers: Not only would brands and retailers lose their established a presence on the platform, as many companies have invested time and resources in creating TikTok content to reach a younger audience and drive engagement, they would lose a connection that TikTok has built a following on — authenticity. – Read More on PYMNTS
3. Fashion extinction: France’s affordable brands in crisis. Even as French luxury labels such as Chanel and Louis Vuitton continue to churn out profits, many midrange brands have been forced to enter bankruptcy proceedings. Except for those with innovative approaches. – Read More on DW
4. Luxury brands to capitalize on coronation jubilation: The event is “good brand recognition” for British companies. “‘Made in England’ is getting stronger and stronger, and what a perfect way to celebrate it with the coronation.” – Read More on the FT
5. Internet Archive’s digital book lending violates copyrights, US judge rules: U.S. District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan on Friday came in a closely watched lawsuit that tested the ability of Internet Archive to lend out the works of writers and publishers protected by U.S. copyright laws. – Read More on Reuters
6. China Consumer Data Shows How 1.4 Million Are Spending Again Post Pandemic: “Consumer confidence on the Chinese mainland has surged and exceeded the pre-pandemic level, and the vitality of the market is expected to be restored within the year.” – Read More on Shine.cn
1. Levi’s to Begin Using AI Generated Models: The clothing retailer is working with Lalaland.ai, a Dutch digital fashion studio that makes customized models generated by artificial intelligence (AI), allowing shoppers to see models “that look more like themselves” wearing Levi’s products. – Read More on PMYNTS
2. Climate change, emissions plans dominate 2023 proxy season: Advocacy groups have increasingly used shareholder resolutions to push US companies to publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and their plans for emissions reductions. In many cases, companies will negotiate a compromise to avoid a vote and the resolution will be withdrawn. – Read More on S&P Global
3. Yoda and Harry Potter Chatbots Could Be the Next Big Legal Battle: It’s only a matter of time until rights holders notice that new AI tools are playing a little loose with their intellectual property. – Read More on Bloomberg
4. SEC Plans Lawsuit Against Coinbase, According to Exchange: Global Inc. that it plans to take enforcement action against the company, escalating its crackdown on digital-currency firms by targeting the biggest U.S. crypto exchange, Coinbase said. – Read More on the WSJ
5. Generative AI, Section 230 and Liability: Assessing the Questions. Will Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – which has provided broad immunity to internet platforms that host third party content– apply to systems like ChatGPT? – Hear More on Tech Policy Press
6. Bangladesh ready to topple China as top clothing exporter to EU: Bangladesh’s exports of clothing to the EU surged nearly 42% in the first nine months of 2022 from the same period the year before to $19.4 billion, while Chinese shipments grew about 22% to $25.5 billion. – Read More on Nikkei
1. Banking Crises Are a Bad Look for Louis Vuitton and Gucci: The luxury industry does well when its customers feel happy and wealthy. Shoppers reined in their appetite for luxury after both the 2008 financial crisis and China’s crackdown on conspicuous consumption in 2015. – Read More on Bloomberg
2. Consumers choose to travel abroad over purchasing luxury goods: Luxury goods enjoyed extra popularity in Korea during the pandemic, but this has been subsiding rapidly as soaring inflation and high interest rates hit people’s wallets hard. – Read More on Korea Times
3. Great merchandising never goes out of fashion: Shein has achieved its “TikTok for e-commerce” status by investing in AI technology to predict consumer demand patterns, all of which has helped it accelerate its time to market. – Read More on McKinsey
4. Boosting Consumption, Economic Stabilization Among Top Agendas at China’s “Two Sessions.” The signals emanating from the Two Sessions could materialize into favorable local policies for luxury brands. For instance, during the sessions, Beijing unveiled a large-scale subsidy program intended to enhance the competitiveness of the city’s retail environment. – Read More on Jing
5. How European Regulators Are Thinking About Emerging Tech: “The types of AI models that these things are based on sometimes have the tendency to make up information or get facts wrong. So that’s a problem everybody is trying to work out, and I think that makes Google cautious also about integrating it into its search engine, which is super lucrative.” – Read More on the WSJ
6. Nike’s holiday quarter plagued by bloated inventory, weak China sales: Nike has been looking for a sales rebound in China, its third-biggest market by revenue, as the region recovers from the Covid pandemic. But those hopes have failed to materialize. – Read More on CNBC
1. Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Over Ownership of $1.47 Million NFT: James Cott, a magistrate judge for the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, dismissed the case and wrote that Free Holdings had failed to establish its claims of ownership and injury. – Read More on the New York Times
2. Justices to consider international reach of U.S. trademark law: The justices will have to apply a modern two-step test – and a 70-year-old case – to determine whether a federal law applies extraterritorially to the Lanham Act, the federal trademark law that was passed in 1946 – a point at which the global economy was far less interconnected than it is today. – Read More on SCOTUS blog
3. Samsung wins jury trial in ‘S10’ trademark lawsuit: Samsung convinced a Los Angeles federal jury on Friday that its Galaxy S10 phones do not violate the trademark rights of a talent-management agency that also uses the “S10” name. – Read More on Reuters
4. Luxury Brand Telfar Lets Consumer Demand Set Its Prices: “This will give us information about how much of each product we should order in the future,” Radboy says. “And the larger the order, the cheaper it costs to manufacture.” – Read More on Fast Co.
5. The growing market for immersive luxury goods in the metaverse: These new immersive experiences raise a number of intellectual property issues. If a manufacturer offers its products physically as well as digitally, it must extend its IP strategy to the digital world. – Read More on Global Legal Post
6. How AI is Disrupting the Fashion Industry Today: The highest potential for companies will come from their ability to merge these types of tools with their own systems and create activations tailored to their own needs. – Read More on Forbes
1. Dog toy poking fun at Jack Daniel’s leads to dispute over parody exception to trademark protections: “I expect that some of the justices will spend a lot of time at the argument exploring exactly what they might want to say about how the federal trademark statutes must bend to accommodate the First Amendment.” – Read More on SCOTUS Blog
2. Finance YouTubers who promoted FTX have now been handed a $1billion lawsuit: The finance influencers are facing a class action lawsuit claiming they were paid “handsomely” to push the FTX brand prior to its collapse, following similar cases brought against celebrity endorsers like Tom Brady, Madonna and Gwenyth Paltrow. (Find the complaint here.) – Read More on Fortune
3. RELATED READ: Yuga Labs, Guy Oseary, Celebs Named in New Lawsuit Over Bored Ape Promo. The defendants engaged in an effort to dupe consumers by way of “manufactured celebrity endorsements and misleading promotions” that helped to “artificially increase the interest in and the price of the Bored Ape NFTs,” causing “investors” to purchase the NFTs at “drastically inflated prices.” – Read More on TFL
4. Aéropostale to Launch Immersive Shopping and Perks in Metaverse: The second phase of the rollout will offer a preview of Aéropostale’s metaverse and will enable members to claim unique avatars, access events and games, and collect points that can be redeemed for merchandise and perks. – Read More on PYMNTS
5. ESG and CSR are Luxury Items: When people get serious about their finances — as they must when the markets are down and business profits are squeezed — they tend to throw the expensive feel-good stuff out the window, as evidenced by the ESG investing backlash and sharp reduction in ESG fund inflows. – Read More on National Review
6. Top EU judge expects a wave of litigation from tech giants against new tech law: The Digital Markets Act (DMA), which came into force in November, will classify online platforms with more than 45 million users as gatekeepers, among other criteria. – Read More on Reuters
1. U.S. Supreme Court asked to decide if AI can be a patent “inventor.” Stephen Thaler petitioned the high court to review an appeals court’s decision that patents can only be issued to human inventors and that his AI system cannot be the legal creator of inventions it generated. (You can find the cert. petition here.) – Read More on Reuters
2. Online-Books Lawsuit Tests Limits of Libraries in Digital Age: A federal judge on Monday will weigh pleas by four major book publishers to stop an online lending library from freely offering digital copies of books, in a case that raises novel questions about digital-library rights and the reach of copyright law that protects the work of writers and publishers. – Read More on the WSJ
3. In US Supreme Court Jack Daniel’s case, a free speech fight over a dog toy: In a case to be argued on Wednesday, the nine justices are expected to use this legal dogfight to clarify the line between a parody protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment and a trademark-infringing ripoff, with repercussions extending beyond booze and pet accessories. – Read More on Yahoo
4. RELATED READ: From False Advertising and FTX to AI and NFTs: Lawsuits to Watch in 2023. SCOTUS’ certiorari grant in the “Bad Spaniels” case comes on the heels of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit holding in March 2020 that the toy is an expressive work entitled to First Amendment protection. – Read More on TFL
5. Gucci, YSL owner Kering pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2035: This new target covering scopes 1, 2 and 3 of the greenhouse gas protocol was revealed ahead of the publication of Kering’s 2020-2023 Sustainability Progress Report on March 22. – Read More from Kering
6. Silicon Valley Bank’s Focus on Startups Was a Double-Edged Sword: Lack of diversification means more risk. But SVB’s focus has real benefits as well: It allowed the bank to build up a tremendous amount of tacit knowledge about how startups and venture capital worked. – Read More on HBR
1. The Future of Fashion Branding for Gen Z? Be as Wacky and Weird as You Can. For Gen Z, absurdity sells because it taps into 3 psychological needs: (i) Novelty; (ii) uniqueness (given what we know about Gen Z screen time and how unforgivingly brief online attention allocation is, it’s no wonder everybody’s interested in MSCHF’s Big Red Boots); and (iii) escape. – Read More on Inc.
2. Zara Extends Lead Over H&M, Faces Down Threat from Shein: The perception among shoppers that Zara is more upmarket than H&M has also given the brand more leeway to increase prices at a time of cost inflation, analysts say. – Read More on the WSJ
3. ICYMI: The Unintended Consequences of Right-to-Repair Laws. The right-to-repair legislation may in some instances lead manufacturers to flood the market with cheap goods, thereby damaging the environment, and in other instances lead manufacturers to dramatically raise the price of goods, thereby hurting consumers. – Read More on HBR
4. RELATED READ: As the “Right to Repair” Movement Gains Steam, What Does it Mean for Luxury? Rolex is, of course, not the only luxury watchmaker that takes such a stance on parts and/or services, a position that could be problematic from an anti-tying perspective. – Read More on TFL
5. How AI Is Changing Artistic Creation and Challenging IP Laws: Questions about the moral implications of AI have left artists divided, and concerns about plagiarism to data privacy have been raised. – Read More on Yahoo
6. Bar exam score shows AI can keep up with “human lawyers,” researchers say: AI can now outperform most law school graduates on the bar exam, the grueling two-day test aspiring attorneys must pass to practice law in the U.S., according to a new study from researchers at Stanford. – Read More on Reuters
1. U.S. firm loses F-word trademark dispute with EU: FA World Entertainment Inc on Wednesday lost its fight to trademark ‘Fucking Awesome’ for products ranging from clothes to skateboards as Europe’s second-highest court backed an EU patent body’s argument that the phrase was not distinctive enough. – Read More on Reuters
2. Where Is the Fast Fashion Backlash? Some apparel retailers are gearing up for climate-conscious consumers to drive a shift in shopping patterns. It just hasn’t happened yet. – Read More on Bloomberg
3. With Project Clover, TikTok touts new EU data privacy and security efforts: TikTok’s trajectory of late suggests that some restrictions could be heading its way, with a group of U.S. senators this week unveiling bipartisan legislation that could allow the government to limit or ban foreign-based technologies such as TikTok, if deemed a national security threat. – Read More on TechCrunch
4. Zara Extends Lead Over H&M, Faces Down Threat from Shein: “Inditex has a very flexible business model; it offers affordable fashion with quality. Many have tried to replicate it, but nobody has managed to do so.” – Read More on the WSJ
5. Chinese Buyers to Boost Luxury Goods Sector: “China should become the industry’s growth engine from this year on, and we expect brands at the top of the luxury-goods pyramid to benefit the most.” – Read More on Morgan Stanley
6. Retail CEOs Want Their Loyal Consumers Back, Reflecting on Q4 Earnings: Nordstrom’s CEO says, “Given the continued uncertain environment, we remain focused on executing with flexibility and agility, including conservative buy plans and faster inventory turns.” – Read More on PYMNTS
1. Luxury Preowned Watches, Your Time Has Come: Luxury watches are in demand as alternative investments. Buyers are paying high premiums for preowned models from top brands, as well as from leading independents like F.P.Journe and De Bethune, with the expectation that the value of these watches will continue to rise. – Read More on BCG
2. How AI could write our laws: The danger of microlegislation—a danger greatly exacerbated by AI—is that it can be used in a way that makes it difficult to figure out who the legislation truly benefits. – Read More on MIT Tech Review
3. H&M Launches US Resale Platform With ThredUp to Cut Fashion Waste: H&M will start its first resale platform in the US market, H&M Pre-Loved, on Tuesday with around 30,000 items of used women’s and kids’ clothing and accessories on hm.thredup.com. – Read More on Bloomberg
4. Metaverse Fashion Is on the Rise: There are a few main markets for on-chain fashion: (1) Consumers who purchase NFTs to wear in the metaverse, (2) gamers on popular platforms like Roblox, (3) digital art collectors who buy these assets for speculation, and (4) social media users of platforms like TikTok who will dabble with AR filters and digital tailoring. – Read More on Coin Desk
5. London fears losing luxury shoppers to Paris and Milan: “We’ve heard from some brands that they’re prioritizing Paris for investment in stores,” Steve Medway, CEO of the Knightsbridge and King’s Road Partnerships, said in light of tax breaks that still offer consumers a way to cut the cost of their purchases. – Read More on Reuters
6. Silicon Valley Bank parent, CEO, CFO are sued by shareholders for fraud: SVB Financial Group and two top executives were sued on Monday by shareholders who accused them of concealing how rising interest rates would leave its SVB unit, which failed last week, “particularly susceptible” to a bank run. – Read More on Reuters