"You are approached by an industry magazine to promote your company and to talk about copyright law, intellectual property and how important this is to your company and the industry as a whole.
Provide a detailed, comprehensive answer (250 - 400 words) on the main points of consideration; bear in mind that your own professional reputation, the reputation of your company and potential future business may depend on how well structured your answer is"
Answer:
Copyright and Intellectual property rights are important parts of all creative industries, not just the games industry. Within the games industry, you can develop and create a game from an idea you have and then file for it to be copyrighted, making it so the idea is owned by your company or whoever has the rights depending on how it’s split. Copyright in the games industry generally covers software/coding, artwork, music/sounds, films/cutscenes, text and gameplay.
Companies can additionally trademark a name for their game, an example being Square Enix recently filing trademarks for “The First Soldier” and “Ever Crisis”, two titles related to the popular Final Fantasy VII universe. If a company infringes on a trademark that means they have used the title of the game for their game in some way, this can cause confusion on if the game is made by the company with the trademark or not so this is a bad idea and will land you in court.
For characters within your game, they are capable of intellectual property (IP) protection. They can also be trademarked, which will last longer. However, if the character isn’t used continuously or the IP isn’t renewed you will lose the rights to them and it will become open to the public.
In order to properly protect your game you should file for as many of these as possible, as the last thing you want is for someone to copy your idea and make money off it themselves. As a company head, you should not only be looking out for the companies profits but also the staff you have at the company. It’s not fair on the staff to work on the game and be very passionate about it only for another company to come and pull it out from under them and make profit off their ideas and designs.
If the industry didn’t have copyright laws then the whole industry would be like the mobile games industry where candy crush and other similar simple games get copied over and over again with a lick of paint over the top to hide that it is a copy. People would start ripping assets from games and changing their look slightly to make their own if we didn’t have these laws. Taking inspiration is one thing, copying is another. An example of this would be Genshin Impact, a recently popular game that was accused of being a Zelda Breath of the Wild clone before it had even released because of it’s vaguely similar design, same climbing system and UI and a range of other stuff. However it was later found after release that the game took inspiration from a wide variety of games to become what it is now, to the point where it doesn’t feel at all like those games and is instead it’s own thing.