The International Game Developers Association has a website containing IP information for gamers.

It includes a 90-page IP primer and a wiki discussion page, plus a blog with some entertaining entries. Sample:

"Curious," you might say, "but what [do intellectual rights in pig-breeding] have to do with Intellectual Property Rights in the game industry?"

Genetic engineering, game engineering and pharmaceutical engineering are close industrial cousins. All three make money from the painstaking and often expensive initial creation of easily-reproduced arrangements of information. Intellectual Property precedents set in any one of these fields carry over, in my opinion, very quickly to any of the others.

Patent applications in each of these three disciplines show similar patterns of abuse: over-broad claims, attempts to obtain patent rights in what should rather be established contractually, attempts to patent common sense. Surely, we've seen these abuses in game industry patents as well.

I believe that Patents, Trademarks, Copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property have genuine public benefit and create genuine incentives to innovators. When applicants abuse the law by trying to get away with as much as they can, including asking for rights they know full well they shouldn't be allowed, and nobody smacks them down, they undermine industry confidence in the system and sow the seeds of...

revolution.

posted by James DeLong @ 10:42 AM | Games

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