- Play this game in the comments.
- List out all the types IP you think you produce.
- Label it as Patent, Copyright or Trademarkable.
OK I’ll bite:
- Artwork/visual assets: copyright
- Logo: copyright and trademark
- original music: copyright
- cover/parody music: none, possibly copyright infringing if not fair use
- code: licensable / subject to license, probably not copyright or patentable unless a specific innovation
- game design/concept: none
How did I do?
Looks good. One correction: code would be copyrightable. The license to a piece of code is a copyright license.
Yeah code is a weird one, there are only so many ways you can architect software. It’s very hard to contest copyright on code unless someone releases a straight up copy of a substantive product, or you have evidence they misappropriated your source.
That’s true but if someone straight up copies your architecture, functions and algorithms then simple renames some variables, it’s going to be quite easily identified as plagiarism.
In the United States, computer programs are literary works, under the definition in the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101.[23] <From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_copyright
So, lets take mario brothers for example.
Someone could write a clone of it, make it identical in every way from a gameplay standpoint, and as long as they use their own sprites, names, and on screen text, it wouldn’t be copyright infringement, as long as they didnt actually copy any of the code from the original game.
Plagiarism is a different story. Sometimes its copyright infringement. Say you send me the code for your new hit game to beta test, and I upload it to the app store claiming it was my game, that would be both Plagiarism, and (unless you released to the public domain) copyright infringement.
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I produce:
- Game title: trademark
- Documentation: umm… who would like to steal that?!
n/a, but ‘copyrightable’ in theory - Code/Scripts: copyright
- Plugins: copyright
- 3D art: copyright
- Logos: trademark
- Scene layouts/Level designs: form i.e. copyright.
I can’t come up with any patentable assets… our work is basically always based on someone else’s work - whatever you create is written in a programming language or using some kind of environment or piece of software. You would need to write your own environment… and then you would use assembly language which in turn is a (patented?) proprietary way of giving instructions to processors… Dead end. Where lies the boundary between a patent and a copyright? I wonder…
Unfortunately, US law has become somewhat confused about patents and software. An early decision holding that the inclusion of a software component did not, by itself, render an invention ineligible for patent protection became used as precedent for the notion that software itself could be patented. Patent protection is limited in time, but more powerful than copyright protection because independent creation is not a defense to patent infringement. That is, if you and I both invent the same thing, with no knowledge on either of our parts as to what the other person is doing, the one of us who patents our invention first has an infringement claim against the other. A lot of people think that’s terrible, but that’s the law. The situation is different for copyrights. If we both develop the same algorithm and write code to implement it, we each have our own copyright to our own code, and neither of us can claim the other person’s code infringes on our copyright.
In my shop, my company logo is a trademark. My customer list is a trade secret. All of my code is protected by copyright, as are my Web site and design notes. I have no patents (and wouldn’t bother to get any, as it is time-consuming to do so and software patents tend to be kind of pointless in a field that changes as fast as gaming does). Note that one can choose to use trade secret protection instead of patents. I once found a bug in a device driver to which I legally had the source. I fixed the bug and wanted to publish the fix for others to use. My boss told me to keep it to myself, as he felt it would give us an advantage in the marketplace. So, we protected my patch as a trade secret. Anyone else who fixed that bug the same way could legally do so, but they had no advantage that would arise from, say, seeing my patent application if we had tried to patent it. Patents have a limited lifetime, but trade secrets do not. So, if you have a clever bit of code, and you don’t need to publish it, then using trade secret protection might be the better path.
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