Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Copyright laws in other countries will vary. However, because of pressure from international
business interests, many are moving towards a model similar to the United States'.
Hmm. Interesting. So “intellectual works” fall under copyright law. It appears that would cover a
game like Poker Dice, because someone has obviously made one, and you can go play it and
buy it right now. From this simplified view, you
would not
be able to make this game. However,
games are special. They are not songs or paintings or even topics, where the interaction between
the consumer and the work is one-way (seeing, hearing, reading); a game could be all of these
and more. Furthermore, a game is defined by rules that govern its play and the universe it exists
within. In that case, there must be some specific information regarding games, right? Yes in fact,
there is. The United States Copyright Office has this to say on the matter of copyrighting games
at
http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
:
“Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the
method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea,
system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing,
merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made
public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing
another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the
particular manner of an author's expression in literary, artistic, or
musical form.”
Wow. Read that again. Digest it. What that means is, pretty much, as far as copyright law is
concerned, anyone can make any game. You cannot copy the art, music, or words in the game
(which fall under copyright law in their own way anyway), but the
idea
of game itself cannot be
copyrighted. Wow, free rein then right? This appears to say that you could make a game named
Yahtzee because the name and rules cannot be copyrighted. However, there is another method
of protection for intellectual property, and that is a trademark.
Considering trademarks
Trademarks
are used in commerce to define a unique idea that cannot be used by another party.
According to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, trademarks are used to “protect
words, names, symbols, sounds, or colors that distinguish goods and services from those
manufactured or sold by others and to indicate the source of the goods. Trademarks, unlike
patents, can be renewed forever as long as they are being used in commerce”
(
http://www.uspto.gov/main/glossary/#t
).
From this definition, it would seem that, while the name “Yahtzee” does not fall under copyright
law, it does fall under trademark law. That is, if the name has indeed been trademarked. To find
this out, you must search for a trademark. How do you do this? Copyright and trademark
searches are usually the duty of the law department of major corporations. Again, we are not
lawyers, but there are still some useful resources available to you that can be used to find out if a
term has been trademarked.
The United States Trademark and Copyright office has an online system named Trademark
Electronic Search System (TESS) that can be used for simple trademark searches. You can find
it here:
http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=4004:eka3g9.1.1
.
