Legal Issues for GameDevelopers: Game Design Concepts
Posted by Dan on July 7, 2009For those of you not taking the summer Game Design Concepts course that everyone on the internet seems to be taking….why not? As if there weren’t enough reason to, you can study the Legal Issues for Game Developers section that I developed for the course. Here’s a quick snippet.
At this point, some of you may be thinking that by posting your game
to the forum, you run the risk that someone will Steal Your Great Idea.
How can you protect yourself from the threat of someone taking your
basic idea, turning it into a working, sellable game, and leaving you
with nothing?
Remember, ideas are not copyrightable, they’re not
trademarkable, not trade secretable, and both difficult and
prohibitively expensive to patent. You can’t protect them anyway, and
you shouldn’t try — instead you should try to come up with new ones,
and start working on the good ones. Don’t freak out when you see
things like Game Jams, or this course and think “Ian says I should post
my work to the discussion forum, but I came up with a Great Idea(tm)
and I don’t want other people to steal it.” Ideas are commonplace in
games, and the value of your idea is nothing compared to the value of
the implementation of that idea, your expertise and hard work in
developing it into something that’s going to make you real money. But
most importantly, our industry is very lateral, very tight-knit, very
collaborative. You’ll find people sharing their ideas at GDC, doing
collaborative projects between studios, or using inspiration from one
game’s mechanics to improve another. Don’t fight it. That’s the way
things work, and by embracing that open atmosphere, you’ll be far
better off.
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Now, this is something I find doesn’t fit with my understanding. Are you trying to say that a game *under development* and not yet published isn’t able to be protected as a trade secret? I find that fundamentally unlikely.
I’m sure that once the game is published, it can’t be protected. But if I were developing a game, I wouldn’t put the concept out in public exactly because the ideas can’t be protected — once they are discussed.
If I were producing a game, I would be sure that my developers and staff had limited non-compete and non-disclosure agreements to protect the game during development (limited to the duration of development basically — I’m not fond of the idea of long-term non-competes within an industry).
Likewise closed beta testers get an NDA, for whatever good that really does these days.
That *would* protect the idea of the game until open beta, in theory — which doesn’t mean that the idea can be protected long term, but it does give a mechanism for the developer to have a decent head start.
That head start is vital for the independent developer, who can be predated upon and overtaken by a big studio, just on the basis of resources.
If I’m off base here, please enlighten me further!
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