Question: Protecting Intellectual Property - Gaming
Anyone at the Gulch familiar with ensuring the legal protection of a custom developed game? I'm comfortable, mostly, with copyright protection for books(ebook) but not so much with games. I had a long time contact that I'd hoped to ask questions but she insisted on $400 for 1 hour a time to provide me with a worksheet guideline I could follow.
I'm hoping to ask a few questions to be pointed in the right direction so I can do it myself to minimize (not eliminate)( costs.
I'm hoping to ask a few questions to be pointed in the right direction so I can do it myself to minimize (not eliminate)( costs.
Having a legal right to protect your software does not automatically protect your software. You have to enforce that right. The problem, of course, with a game is who are you going to sue? Are you going to sue some poor schmuck who copies his friend's version? How many thousand dollars are you going to spend on this? What will you get back.
Most people who need to protect software use some copy protection mechanism to prevent the copies from being made, often some online registration.
I don't know a lot about what game designers use. In our case we have a product with relatively few custom installations which gives us more control. Our software costs from $5000 to as much as $100,000 or more (far too rarely). We lock the installation to a specific set of hardware with a registration process that for obvious reasons I won't go into too deeply. I did roll my own in this case. There might be better tools available.
The nature of your game, how you expect to install it and how you are going to play it will give you some clues as to the tools you can use to protect it.
I intend to run the majority of the game on hosted servers rented (co-located) at a game server rental agency I'm acquainted with for many years. The client should only have those elements of the game as it related to his/her specific local profile. I guess what I'm mainly concerned with is that my title and specific and unique implementation of the concept is exclusive to me (my LLC).
Protecting the game elements is beyond my specific expertise. Personally, I don't worry too much about people copying my work that's in the market place because the development time is such that they start their development significantly behind mine and if they do try to copy my work, it's a moving target and I have an inherent time advantage.
I took enough programming classes (VAX Unix, basic, pascal, and C++) when I was in college to know that my strength is networking. Still, I understand the logic and can work fairly effectively as a project manager (or in this instance a game producer).
Thanks again!
Now there have been situations where people in game build resources and then use out of game forums for selling them to other players for real money with the resources subsequently delivered in-game (or not to much consternation). This can get ugly and many designers rule it against the Terms of Service so that if it becomes prominent players can be banned.
This is hard to solve with software because they are legitimately created objects.
That said, I am not a fan of this "intellectual property" argument (patents in particular). I can see trademarks in that people might buy my "brand" by looking for my trademark (for instance, I buy dog food by looking for the same artwork on the bag each time I shop for it)
I DONT get the idea of forbidding others from making something for 20 years, just because I was the first one to get the government to give me a patent. Others could have thought of it independently before me or after me, but I would be using the government to prevent others from using the results of THEIR thoughts. I just dont like that, particularly in this age of "patent trolls" who patent everything and never commercialize them- but prevent me from commercializing a similar idea I thought of independently.
This notion is politically incorrect, but thats how I see it.
With the products I make as an engineer, its rarely the idea that makes it successful by itself. Its the way its executed and the details that get people to want it. Competitors usually dont understand that and simply copy (like the chinese do all the time).
Now if you also want to protect some innovations within the game you probably need to seek patent protection for those. Filing a provisional yourself is <= $200 the last time I looked.
I assume your game is going to have a name and a trademark may be as important or more important than your copyright. You can build up common law trademarks and put people on notice by using a superscript TM. If the game does well you will want to file for a federal trademark registration. That is not real expensive.
That will be $300 LOL
Protect Your Writings: A legal Guide For Authors
Maria Crimi Speth
http://www.amazon.com/Protect-Your-Wr...
This helped me much