Hello All,
Skipping Who I am and What I do, well sort of; Basically I have been studying C# and now MonoGame, both of which have been a long time focus of my future direction for programming. I started out in late 2010… yep rather late in the game for distinct reasons… [with a language based around BASIC which now for all measures is defunct forcing me to move on, however I did pick up some core understanding of how programming works…] but nevertheless went from there to C#.
Late last year spent some time going through C# in general and again for a second time just recently again using a second perspective [Highly recommended to go through two books covering it in two distinct ways and a few months in-between], and now feel I am ready to tackle MonoGame as my main focus for my game development pipeline. I am also studying the .NET Framework.
Having been on a Dev forum in the past I have become accustomed to something that was done on their forum, a ‘Hello World’ first post type thing, but I could not find that here and was concerned I may be considered as a spam poster if I did that, as such I decided to jump right into my first topic and combine the two. Hopefully General Topics was the correct place to post this.
Moving onto my Topic Post.
I Like to tackle projects of any sort back to front, that meaning I like to look at where I intend to be and work my way to where I should begin in order to create a plan of action [Some work the other way but through business I learned to focus on the worst case scenarios and go from there, Working pretty well thus far], and with Games that often eventually becomes something like a GDD/TDD or PDD… [Game/Technical/Product - Design Document] I wanted to therefore cover the discussion on IP and Copyright first, because if you think of this first or last, it can become quite a roadblock at any point.
I think other legal topics can be discussed here too as to keep it concentrated and relative.
Having have done previous research in the past regarding General Copyright/IP related querying I wanted to see and collate other viewpoints and also see what do you do or recommend to do in order to protect your IP. I was hoping we could focus the details on Game Production related aspects of these laws…
I have some understanding on how Copyright and IP work, but nothing concrete, so this thread could serve as a repository for reliable and useful links such as, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_clone As well as things like Local Laws which may be common to you, however unfamiliar to a dev who does not speak the local language and cannot find content in their native language [As if searching in a native and not local language can result in irrelevant content], remember App Stores are global, but each Market has its own Laws to abide by, I could be wrong but that is the point of this topic 
.
So we could discuss legal areas such as:
- Presentational – Art Assets, Music, etc.
- Mechanical – Control/Input, Character Movements/Skills, etc.
- Story – Literal copy or adaptation etc.
- Characters – Blatant copying of character from appearance to changing small details and such.
Etc.
I know digital content is Copyrighted/Your IP when you create it but how do you prevent someone copying your game anyway? I speak of the many Clones or games which need not be mentioned or named here but you know what I mean.
Having read the Forum FAQ > http://community.monogame.net/guidelines which I hope you have , I also clicked into the TOS [Unable to link as new user and this is the third link here] which describes the IP and Copyright position of this site. Perhaps a good reference for those not already accustomed to legalese .
I am hoping this thread helps others both new to the industry and those who have or are about to release a product into the wild and may or may not have considered these aspects or may be unsure of where to begin.
I will do my best to update this first post with the most notable links or content, ergo or we could just utilise the Heart aspect of the forum too .
A tip for now would be to do the unthinkable, find a game similar to yours and read their legalese material to see if you can relate to how it is written and work out what is involved in writing it.
Perhaps someone can suggest where to begin relating to that, who do we go to-to get these documentations written, can we go to our standard legal team [Lawyer/Solicitor etc.] or must we hunt for a specialised legal team? Or is there a website that can help with a standard draft?
Thanks for reading.