Ready to protect your video game? You can register a copyright yourself or with the assistance of an online service provider or an attorney. This portion of the site is for informational purposes only. The content is not legal advice. The statements and opinions are the expression of author, not LegalZoom, and have not been evaluated by LegalZoom for accuracy, completeness, or changes in the law.
What parts of video games do copyright laws protect? Other aspects of video games that copyright law can protect include: Character images Scene images Setting Dialogue Music Copyright laws can even protect the way a character or essential image appears and moves. What parts of video games do copyright laws not protect? What rights do gamers have? Can a creator register a copyright for video games created under open source and Creative Commons schemes?
To do this, you will need a disc copying program. The most popular and powerful disc copying program is CloneCD. CloneCD is available for free for 21 days, which should allow you to copy any CD you need to without having to pay. You can always uninstall it and reinstall it if you want to restart the trial period. Create an image from the disc. When you first start CloneCD, you will see four options. Select the first one to start the image creation process.
This will copy the entire contents of the CD as a single file, which will then be able to be burned to a new disc. In the next window, select the drive that contains the disc that you want to copy.
Choose the disc type. Once the disc has been analyzed, you will be given several options to choose from. Set a location for the image. Choose a location on your hard drive to store the image file. The image file will be as big as the CD is, which means it could be up to MB large. Wait for the image to be created. Once you set the location of the image file and continue, the image creation process will begin. This could take a significant amount of time. Avoid doing anything else on the computer during this process, as opening other programs could end up causing errors.
Burn the image. Once the image has been created, you can burn it to a new blank CD. CloneCD has a burning function built-in, but you can use any image burning program, such as ImgBurn or Nero. See this guide for more details on burning image files to a disc. Copyright protects artistic and literary expression. While this meant just books, maps and charts at the beginning of the United States, today it covers a broad variety of creative expression from email, to websites, to video games.
Generally speaking, the underlying code is protected as a literary work, and the artwork and sound are protected as an audiovisual work. However, your artwork only has copyright protection insofar as no one can just closely duplicate it. If your princess was of your own creation, then you should be fine. Similarly, certain artwork in video games falls under the doctrine of scenes a faire. This references particular artwork and elements of a video game that are necessary to execute a particular idea and are NOT copyrightable.
Scenes a faire also applies to certain genres of games. For example, if you have a golfing game, you would include certain design elements like holes, golf balls, golf clubs, golfers, grass, trees, and water. Here a very brief discussion of how the courts look at video games in determining whether two works are subtantially similar enough to warrant infringement.
After separating out the protectable elements from the unprotected, then it looks to see whether the protectable parts are substantially similar. This naturally favors accused infringers.
For a developer who creates a Pacman clone game for example, they would have a reasonable shot of success where courts use this approach because if level designs and sprite designs themselves weren't copied, then all of the organization and arrangement that make up Pacman's gameplay has become scene-a- faire in the 2-D video game development world.
Total Concept and Feel Approach The court doesn't dissect a work into "protected" and "unprotected. This naturally favors plantiffs because they can essentially argue that all sorts of "facts," "phrases," "stock characters," and especially "ideas" that aren't normally protectable can be protected. Under this analysis, a Pacman clone may face more of a challenge. They could potentially bring a variety of claims against you, specifically right of publicity, which protects an individuals right to have their name or likeness voice, image, etc exploited commercially.
While using statistics is not a violation of the right of publicity per se , be careful how they are presented. A critical issue is whether it looks like the athlete or celebrity is endorsing your game. To establish infringement, two elements must be proven: 1 ownership of a valid copyright, and 2 copying of constituent elements of the work that are original.
Schaeffer, Published in Landslide, Vol. In that article Schaeffer writes:. To discuss copyright in board games, we must look back to an Supreme Court case ironically having nothing at all to do with games. In Baker v. Selden U. His book met with little success, but when another publisher began successfully selling a book containing very similar forms, his widow filed a copyright infringement suit.
The Supreme Court held that although the book was subject to copyright, the bookkeeping method itself was not a suitable subject of copyright, and because the forms were merely implements for performing the method, they were not copyrightable subject matter. Justice Joseph Bradley wrote. The copyright of a book on book-keeping cannot secure the exclusive right to make, sell, and use account-books prepared upon the plan set forth in such book.
The principle laid down in Baker v. Selden was later codified in the Copyright Act of , which says clearly:. Board games occupy a somewhat eccentric niche in intellectual property law, often not fully protectable by copyright, trademark, or patent, and thus susceptible to knock-offs and alternate themes.
A would-be board game designer should understand which kinds of IP protection apply to which aspects or components of the game, and take appropriate steps to protect them accordingly Protection of intellectual property is an important concern in this forum, but I've noticed that the same questions are regularly asked followed by some of the same wrong answers, often finally corrected.
I am not a lawyer, but have run my own book publishing and apparel company for over 6 years, and am now getting into game publishing.
I regularly encounter people - even veterans in the publishing industry - who have little clue how copyrights, trademarks and patents really work. US law is a bit of a mess thanks to some Mickey Mouse lobbyists.
I highly recommend the sources that have I have learned from, Copyright. According to the U. Copyright Office : Quote:. 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.
For example, the text matter describing the rules of the game or the pictorial matter appearing on the gameboard or container may be registrable. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Can one effectivly copy a game without infringing copyright? Asked 2 days ago. Active 2 days ago. Viewed 65 times.
Improve this question. David Siegel. David Siegel David Siegel 2 2 silver badges 17 17 bronze badges. As a note this is in response to a meta question asking about making a copy of a game. That link isn't relevant since the question in discussion here asks about creating a copy of an existing game and not reusing parts of an existing game.
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