Yajur Sharma
Importance of copyright in gaming industry
By : Yajur Sharma (Student at Manipal University Jaipur )
The gaming business may appear to be a burgeoning leisure sector, yet this could not be further from the truth. Since the 1970s, the gaming business has had a stronghold in India, and the digital gaming sector is developing at a rapid pace. According to Forbes, India’s gaming sector is one of the top five in the world for mobile gaming, with a market value of over $890 million. The industry’s scale alone demonstrates the clear need for legal protection, as well as the role IPR may play in this regard, given the many aspects of the area. Given the industry’s rapid growth and the increased legal protection it provides, the area of intellectual property rights (IPR) has been increasingly active in the sector. The most essential of these is the Copyright Laws’ protection of gaming works and any related production.
There are significant discrete fields that can be protected by Copyright Laws in light of the many works in play that make up a video game.
The Copyright Contents in a Game and its conduct
- A video game is made up of many distinct components that combine to create the experience we have as players. All of the components are software programmes that convert into a game's user interface. Although copyright is already given over software coding, the resultant work in a video game, such as the storey line/script, the characters, and sections of the code individually, can be copyrighted as well.
- Although video game materials are copyrightable, no subject or idea depicted in a game may be copyrighted, since this is the basic rule of copyright, which states that no topic or concept can claim copyright protection unless it is expressed in literary, artistic, or musical form. This is crucial to grasp since a character in a game based on World War II can be copyrighted, but another character in a game or a game based on World War II cannot.
- 1) Protection of Gameplay Under Copyright law:
- In this we see how a player interacts with a game is referred to as gaming. It is the method in which the game advances based on the game's rules and the player's participation. This covers the game's storyline, narrative, obstacles, and levels. This means that the game's objectivity and narrative cannot be duplicated by another game, protecting not only the game's relevance but also giving the game's authors the creative freedom to develop future games based on the tale of the prior game.
- 2) Protection of Sounds and Music under copyright law:
- As we take the example of famous game Mario, It has a different kind of music and background sounds which is created by composer Mr.Koji Kando. These musical compositions, as well as noises associated with certain features and activities of the game, such as the sound of collecting money and leaping, are protected by copyright. Mario's music is well-known across the world, with hundreds of instrumental covers available on YouTube. Any unlicensed use of the music will result in royalties being paid to Nintendo, who will then distribute them to the sound artists. Copyright protection usually extends to conversations in games that actively employ them as part of the player-game interface.
- 3) Protection of Game Codes under copyright law:
- We must first understand the role of software in gaming before dealing with game codes in the context of copyright protection. The first is Game Engines, which are fundamental frameworks that game creators use to construct games, and the second are readable software codes that allow games to be played on a variety of devices.
- The framework (the Gaming Engine) is either owned by the creators or licenced to them. As a result, if two gaming firms utilise the same Game Engine, some important aspects that overlap in the two games based on the software engines' coding will be rendered beyond the scope of copyright protection. Although the two games utilising the same Gaming Engine accomplish essentially distinct characteristics, they are copyrightable independently. Rockstar Advanced Game Engine, UbiArt Framework, and other well-known gaming engines are only a few examples. In the case of Sega Genisis v Accolade Games, Accolade created a development manual (for its gaming console) that incorporated the information it had discovered (Game code or the chip sequence of the game discs that was readable through the Sega Device) about the requirements for a Genesis-compatible game through reverse engineering. The Ninth Circuit of the United States decided that disassembling (or reverse engineering) copyrighted object code constitutes a fair use of the content if it is the only means to access copyrighted portions of the code and there is a valid cause for doing so.
- To clarify the situation, there are two sorts of codes: source code, which is the device's software, and object code, which is the code that controls how a specific piece of hardware interacts with the device. The object code is reverse engineered in this case so that Sega game chips may be read and played on Accolade gaming machines.
- 4) Protection of Characters under copyright law:
- The example of Mario is ideally suited to provide some insight into this field of protection and the subsequent safeguards. Mario, a plumber whose life focuses on saving a princess after crossing numerous levels, is one of the most renowned video game characters of all time. Nintendo owns the copyright to Mario (both the game and the character), and the rights to Mario (both the game and the character) are valid until 2080. This not only means that Nintendo has exclusive marketing rights to Mario, but it also means that any toy, accessory, garment or apparel, and a variety of other things with Mario on them may only be sold after licensing such usage of the character from Nintendo.