A question about licensing...

[GMer]

How do license my game so no one can (legally) steal my idea? Do I get a copyright or something else?

[Lucky_foot]

What country are you in?

I know the US laws state that an original idea (note Original idea) put down in tangible form is copyrighted immediately. For more protection you could file your game with the US Copyright office.

If your game is based off another person's universe (aka Halo, diablo, etc) then you can't copyright it as it's considered a derivative work.

[GMer]

So I can copyright a game made with Reality Factory? (Maybe I should have been a little more clear on that... )

[AndyCR]

There's no law against "stealing" ideas; the closest you can get to that is a patent, which as it applies to software comes close to what you describe but would never be issued for such a thing. Patents as they apply to software are already ridiculously overpowered, but that would be over the top even for US law.

Yes, you can copyright a game made with Reality Factory (though you wouldn't own the copyright on Reality Factory itself, of course, but rather on your media), but just because you made a game about "people from outer space controlling people on earth and causing them to start a war" or some such doesn't in any way prevent someone else from doing so, as long as they leave your code, your art, your sounds, etc. alone.

[GMer]

Thank you for the clarification, AndyCR!

[sankha93]

Does anybody know about GNU General Public License. I have been using it for quite some time. It is a great way to copyright your stuff without paying anything. It only requires you to give the source code also (with which I have no problem). You may try it out. It can be found at http://www.fsf.org/licensing/

[AndyCR]

You may be mistaken about copyright law. Your work is copyrighted as soon as you make it; there's no need to "purchase a copyright", and using a given license doesn't mean you have a registered copyright nor do you have to put a license on a work for it to be copyrighted.

"The 1886 Berne Convention first established recognition of copyrights among sovereign nations, rather than merely bilaterally. Under the Berne Convention, copyrights for creative works do not have to be asserted or declared, as they are automatically in force at creation: an author need not "register" or "apply for" a copyright in countries adhering to the Berne Convention. As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work, and to any derivative works unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them, or until the copyright expires."

If there is a "license agreement" on a piece of software, it means that the software is using standard copyright law, with provisions tacked on in the agreement (and there's debate as to whether that is binding). If the software is covered by a "license" (such as the GPL), the software foregoes standard copyright law in favor of it's own terms, which may or may not hold up in court. If it is invalidated in court or the user violates the license, it will go back to standard copyright law; thus, if you do not comply with the GPL when copying a piece of GPL'ed software, it rubberbands back to standard copyright law in your region, which in the US means you no longer have the right to copy the software in any way (and thus, companies like LinkSys who were distributing modified versions of Linux with their routers without providing the source code lost the right to distribute it, and thus had to either comply or stop using it. They chose to comply.)

It is also useful to read this: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/webcopyr.html

[GMer]

Thank you very much for the clarification.
Let me state what you all said to see if I got it straight:
-I can pay the money to get a directly-from-the-government copyright as long as I stay within the boundaries of the Reality Factory Terms of use (e.g. not claiming I made Reality Factory).

-If my game becomes original it is automatically protected by a basic copyright

-If I use the GNU General Public Liscense I won't need to pay anything and it will copyright my game content as long I provide the source code ... but what if you don't change the RF source code?

I really want to know all I can about copyrights and how to implement them in Reality Factory, because in the August Nintendo Power (I think it was August, I just flipped through it in a grocery store) on a page describing a game (Rhythm Rengoku Gold I think) it had a picture of two Moai (or Easter island heads) in the tropics, which I have featured in my (somewhat buggy) game here:

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/27144

I am a little P-Oed, but there is little I can do, because they may deny that they were inspired by it to protect their rears, and I can't afford an expert on such things.

[AndyCR]

Thank you very much for the clarification.
Let me state what you all said to see if I got it straight:
-I can pay the money to get a directly-from-the-government copyright as long as I stay within the boundaries of the Reality Factory Terms of use (e.g. not claiming I made Reality Factory).

You can get a registered copyright, I believe, on the media you made for the game. You cannot get one on Reality Factory itself, however, since someone else owns the copyright on it (multiple people, actually).

-If my game becomes original it is automatically protected by a basic copyright

Yes, the only thing which the non-registered copyright may have an issue with is holding up in court, if there's trouble proving you did indeed make it.

-If I use the GNU General Public Liscense I won't need to pay anything and it will copyright my game content as long I provide the source code ... but what if you don't change the RF source code?

You seem to be a slight bit confused here. Your game content is copyrighted automatically in becoming an original, copyrightable work. If you wish to cover it with a given license, you can do that, since you are the owner of the copyright on the media. However, you couldn't put Reality Factory under the GPL, since you don't own the copyright on Reality Factory. Since you don't own the copyright, you can't change the license - you can only comply with the existing license, or do the things allowed by standard copyright law. Either way, putting the GPL on media is very rarely done and doesn't really make sense, since the GPL was written with code in mind, not media.

I really want to know all I can about copyrights and how to implement them in Reality Factory, because in the August Nintendo Power (I think it was August, I just flipped through it in a grocery store) on a page describing a game (Rhythm Rengoku Gold I think) it had a picture of two Moai (or Easter island heads) in the tropics, which I have featured in my (somewhat buggy) game here:

http://www.yoyogames.com/games/show/27144

I am a little P-Oed, but there is little I can do, because they may deny that they were inspired by it to protect their rears, and I can't afford an expert on such things.

Without knowing the details I can't comment on what happened. If they were just "inspired" by it, there is nothing they did wrong.

[GMer]

Thank you for the major clarification!