Nfts
Judge bans Mason Rothschild from displaying his MetaBirkin NFTs
A federal judge in the United States has banned digital artist Mason Rothschild from exhibiting a series of digital artworks in the form of non-fungible tokens at a museum in Sweden. The NFTs feature 3D renderings of Hermès’ famous Birkin bags covered in fur.
Rothschild had been involved in a legal battle with the luxury house after Hermès sued him on NFTs in 2022. A unanimous jury found him responsible for trademark infringement and cybersquatting, ordering him to pay the fashion giant $133,000 in damages after a nine-day trial in February 2023. The court ruled a permanent injunctionpreventing the artist from further harming the Hermès brand with his NFTs.
U.S. District Court Judge Jed Rakoff later blasted Rothschild in an order calling him an “outright crook” who tried to cover up his fraud by “posing as an artist to mint his tokens.” MetaBirkin “. In response to the verdict, Rothschild insisted in a statement that “the First Amendment gives me the right to make and sell works of art depicting Birkin bags.”
Earlier this year in January, the artist asked the court whether the injunction would prevent him from allowing Stockholm’s Spritmuseum to display the NFTs in an upcoming exhibition about Andy Warhol and commercial art.
Hermès filed a response seeking to block it in February. The court then heard from two witnesses: Mia Sundberg, a representative of the museum, and Blake Gopnik, a critic who had helped organize the planned exhibition. (Gopnik previously wrote a Washington Post article opinion article titled “An Misguided Jury Failed to See the Art in Mason Rothschild’s MetaBirkins.” “)
Court documents show the museum planned to note the suit against Rothschild in descriptive text accompanying the MetaBirkins if permission for their display was granted.
The judge ultimately accepted Hermès’ legal arguments that Rothschild had not provided any details about the permissions he would grant to the museum, including whether the exhibition would include merchandising or how he planned to promote the exhibition.
“We do not know, for example, whether the license will cover the sale of products featuring MetaBirkins in the museum store or elsewhere,” explained the fashion giant. The court therefore determined that there was a risk that the play would circumvent the injunction.
“Without a clear and concrete statement that, as the jury unanimously found, [Rothschild] designed the MetaBirkins NFTs to fool the public into believing that Hermes was somehow behind the images, there is little reason to expect visitors to the exhibition to understand that [his] the creation and distribution of MetaBirkins NFT was a fraudulent enterprise in which Hermes had no part,” the judge said.
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