It is virtually impossible to protect game ideas, but virtually no idea is new. On rare occasions someone deliberately copies someone else’s game, but game designers cannot worry about this: they have to talk to publishers, funding sources, and other people about their games.
In most cases in the tabletop industry, when two games are published that strongly resemble one another, it’s a case of independent creation of similar material. In video games it’s much more common for companies to deliberately “clone” good but often obscure games; unfortunately, given the copyright law there is usually very little that can be done about it.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, though I have listened to presentations about intellectual property by lawyers.)
Copyright protects the words you write and the artwork you create from exact wholesale copying. Game ideas/mechanics are specifically *not* protected. Copyright protection exists as soon as you write something. If you want/expect to sue someone then you will need to register your copyright (about $35). Copyright violations are illegal even if there is no financial gain, but there is a murky fair use doctrine that allows someone to use brief quotes.
Trademarks and service marks protect game titles and occasionally taglines or other associated mottos. When you put the letters TM after the word or phrase you want to trademark on a product that you are selling then you have claimed trademark, but occasionally companies register the trademark for some $350, indicated by a circled “R” ®. (The common law trademark can only work when your product is actually being sold, not when it is in planning stages or after it’s out of print.)
Patents are supposed to protect individual expressions of ideas and products, so you could patent a game, but commercial games are almost never patented, and defending the patent in court would be prohibitively expensive even for fairly large publishers, yet almost two thirds of patents are invalidated when tested in court. Obtaining the patent at $3,000-$10,000 or more is likely to be more than the game is worth (quite apart from the difficulty of defending the patent).
Companies that hold the intellectual rights for famous characters such as Batman or Luke Skywalker have no interest in allowing these characters to be used in games from small companies: it isn’t even worth the time and money they’d spend to arrange and monitor. It is very likely a waste of time for a designer to create a game that uses characters, stories, or settings from some other commercial property such as a film or novel. Most likely someone has licensed that property for games and will have their own ideas of the kinds of games they want. There are examples of someone creating a game using someone else’s intellectual property and then getting a license to make the game, but it’s quite unusual. No license, no publish.
If a freelancer licenses his game to a publisher he needs to be sure the contract spells out exactly how profits are distributed for ancillary items, whether they are T-shirts or an electronic version of a tabletop game or a tabletop version of an electronic game.
If you work full-time for a video game company, they may include in your contract a clause that any game you create during the time you work at the company belongs to them. If you create games independently you need to get this clause changed/removed.
The game industry - even video games - is fairly small, and RPGs are very small in comparison. If someone copies another person’s game or a significant part, most everyone will hear about it, and the copier will not prosper in the long run.
This article was contributed by Lewis Pulsipher (lewpuls) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. Lew was Contributing Editor to Dragon, White Dwarf, and Space Gamer magazines and contributed monsters to TSR's original Fiend Folio, including the Elemental Princes of Evil, denzelian, and poltergeist. You can follow Lew on his web site and his Udemy course landing page. If you enjoy the daily news and articles from EN World, please consider contributing to our Patreon!
“I've always believed that the best way you combat intellectual property theft is making a product available that is well priced, well timed to market, whether it's a movie product, TV product, music product, even theme-park product.” Bob Iger
In most cases in the tabletop industry, when two games are published that strongly resemble one another, it’s a case of independent creation of similar material. In video games it’s much more common for companies to deliberately “clone” good but often obscure games; unfortunately, given the copyright law there is usually very little that can be done about it.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, though I have listened to presentations about intellectual property by lawyers.)
Copyright protects the words you write and the artwork you create from exact wholesale copying. Game ideas/mechanics are specifically *not* protected. Copyright protection exists as soon as you write something. If you want/expect to sue someone then you will need to register your copyright (about $35). Copyright violations are illegal even if there is no financial gain, but there is a murky fair use doctrine that allows someone to use brief quotes.
Trademarks and service marks protect game titles and occasionally taglines or other associated mottos. When you put the letters TM after the word or phrase you want to trademark on a product that you are selling then you have claimed trademark, but occasionally companies register the trademark for some $350, indicated by a circled “R” ®. (The common law trademark can only work when your product is actually being sold, not when it is in planning stages or after it’s out of print.)
Patents are supposed to protect individual expressions of ideas and products, so you could patent a game, but commercial games are almost never patented, and defending the patent in court would be prohibitively expensive even for fairly large publishers, yet almost two thirds of patents are invalidated when tested in court. Obtaining the patent at $3,000-$10,000 or more is likely to be more than the game is worth (quite apart from the difficulty of defending the patent).
Companies that hold the intellectual rights for famous characters such as Batman or Luke Skywalker have no interest in allowing these characters to be used in games from small companies: it isn’t even worth the time and money they’d spend to arrange and monitor. It is very likely a waste of time for a designer to create a game that uses characters, stories, or settings from some other commercial property such as a film or novel. Most likely someone has licensed that property for games and will have their own ideas of the kinds of games they want. There are examples of someone creating a game using someone else’s intellectual property and then getting a license to make the game, but it’s quite unusual. No license, no publish.
If a freelancer licenses his game to a publisher he needs to be sure the contract spells out exactly how profits are distributed for ancillary items, whether they are T-shirts or an electronic version of a tabletop game or a tabletop version of an electronic game.
If you work full-time for a video game company, they may include in your contract a clause that any game you create during the time you work at the company belongs to them. If you create games independently you need to get this clause changed/removed.
The game industry - even video games - is fairly small, and RPGs are very small in comparison. If someone copies another person’s game or a significant part, most everyone will hear about it, and the copier will not prosper in the long run.
This article was contributed by Lewis Pulsipher (lewpuls) as part of EN World's Columnist (ENWC) program. Lew was Contributing Editor to Dragon, White Dwarf, and Space Gamer magazines and contributed monsters to TSR's original Fiend Folio, including the Elemental Princes of Evil, denzelian, and poltergeist. You can follow Lew on his web site and his Udemy course landing page. If you enjoy the daily news and articles from EN World, please consider contributing to our Patreon!
