IP, Morality & The Gaming Industry: Bang! — New Copyright Decisions

Bang! BoxEight years ago I wrote an article called “IP, Morality & The Gaming Industry” where I bemoaned the fact that Intellectual Property don’t adequately protect game creation. Games like AquariusBarbarossa, and Commands & Colors got ripped off to varying degrees, and the designers didn’t have a lot of legal fallback. That’s because copyright only protects the concrete representation of a game and patents, which could protect mechanics, are too expensive.

Today, that understanding of intellectual property law seems to be changing, so I wanted to post a short news piece talking about two new US court decisions.

Spry Fox vs Lolapps (2012) got quite a bit of attention a few years ago. It’s about an app, not a board game, but it’s now being used as the basis of more recent decisions, so it’s worth looking at. The suit centered on a rather innovative gaming app called Triple Town. Like many puzzle games of recent years, the object is to move identical objects together in a small grid, but here they form something else. Then another game called Yeti Town came around and Spry Fox, the Triple Town publisher, said it was a rip-off. Continue reading

IP, Morality, and the Gaming Industry

IP. Intellectual Property. It’s theoretically what encourages creators to create, but here’s a dirty little secret: it generally (and I speak for the United States here, but there’s an increasing amount of conformity throughout the world) doesn’t protect games.

You see, there are two types of IP of general interest to most publishers: copyright and trademark. And, as we’ll see neither of them protects what’s actually the core of a good game design.

(And before I get going, let me carefully note, I’m not a lawyer, but I have been working with this sort of stuff for a while.)

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