How devs can protect their games, problems with patent trolls, and other legal issues in games industry
The seventh episode of Games and Names, a games industry podcast launched by AppMagic in partnership with WN Media Group, is here. It is dedicated to a really complex yet important topic — the legal side of the games industry and how developers can protect the results of their creative work.
Games and Names co-hosts, AppMagic VP of product Stan Minasov and Product Madness senior game designer Jesse Kroon, were joined by not one, but two special guests — Alexandra Kurdyumova, co-founder of consulting firm Futura Digital, and Alina Davletshina, the company’s head of digital.
With both Kurdyumova and Davletshina having solid legal background (including in the games industry), they discussed the following topics:
- Patenting a game idea, the pitfalls of this process that could take two to three years per trademark, and why only big companies like Warner Bros. or Nintendo can afford to spend tons of money on it;
- Why it is almost impossible to protect a game mechanic, and what is the rationale behind big publishers’ strategy of establishing its own R&D centers and hiring thousands of lawyers to register thousands of patents;
- What steps a studio should take if someone completely copied their game (there are successful cases such as when Voodoo won a court case against Rollic Games for copying the core mechanics of Woodturning);
- What is “unfair competition” and how it can help you protect your game — i.e. when another company misleads customers and tries to benefit from your games and reputation;
- Who are patent trolls, and how big companies try to protect themselves from these “little annoying fish”;
- How a new studio can protect itself in the legal area, from making sure the rights to all the work of your employees are collected correctly to filing a trademark in at least one-two jurisdictions (the US and EU).
You can watch the full episode below or listen to it on:
