UK Publishing / Self Publishing Query

Anything which you have originated is protected by copyright in all the countries which are signatories of the Berne Convention. It's automatic. However, you have to prove it. As such filing for a registered copyright is not a difficult thing and gives you more proof over what you have created. The cost for a solicitor to do it is about $1000 but you can do it yourself for a few hundred and a few hours study.

Many games are patented but not all. There are several reasons. Most often it is the cost and secondly it may not be novel enough to qualify. In the first part the cost is easily over $10000 for patent in one country. If there is prior art and you can not circumvent it, then your out the cash and no patent.

The reason to go for patent is because other game designers can see your idea, like it, and modify it with some of their own ideas and market it as their own. Patents prevent that but only to a point. There has to be a significant amount of new matter for your claims to be valid enough to be granted patent. Even then, when you narrow your claims to circumvent the prior art you end up with little protection.

One of the down sides of patenting is the cost of enforcing your rights. It is possible to buy infringement insurance but it is costly. If someone decides to copy your work and you do nothing about it, after a short time you loose your rights of enforcement. So you have to be very certain you have something of value before you start investing into it.

With copyright you can show your design to anyone at anytime but with patent you have one year from the date you first made it public to apply for patent in the USA. After that time you can not be granted a patent.

If you want to show your completed design to a potential licensee, then you should get a nondisclosure agreement signed or a noncompetition agreement. Some licensees won't sign them but a few will.

If you publish yourself, and sell copies for cash, then you will need to pay taxes and as such you will need to register yourself as a business. It's not very difficult to set up a sole proprietorship but it costs a few hundred dollars and all your costs can then be tax deducted from your other earnings.

Sometimes offering for license first can be advantageous where the quality of the game is speculative. If you market it wrong then the game has a history of failing in the marketplace and you will have to explain why if you try to interest a publisher.

Marketing the game yourself can be profitable if you know how. I've seen people walk away from hundreds of thousands of up front cash dollars to produce their game themselves and end up washing dishing and wondering why. There is a good profit margin as many board games are priced between 10 and 50 dollars. However, the cost of producing a marketable quality game, will cost you $10000 just to get a few hundred copies. You can reduce these costs by doing most of the work yourself but publicizing is the key to success and it costs money.

In the wild world of writing books, you can cover yourself by sending your manuscript to yourself by certified mail. This requires you to sign for it when it arrives. The postal stamp provides you a verifiable date. You will also get the "certified delivery" card that you sign upon manuscript arrival sent back through the mail system back to you. Yet more date proof. Then, you stick it in a draw and never open it unless you need to do so with a lawyer in an infringement lawsuit.

I don't see any reason why this same method would not work for a game. Just package the prototype up and send it certified mail to yourself. Then, never open it unless you have to.

This isn't as good as a registered copyright, but it does offer some proof of your idea with a certified agency (post office) giving you the date of your idea AND it does it at a much cheaper price. Of course, I am not an attorney adn laws may vary from country to country so you may want to check your national laws to ensure this will work (I am in the USA).

Someone here in the forum mentioned that the Games Design Workshop is another "paper trail" proving (in a very public way) that you worked on a specific game at a specific time. It will also give you a good basis for revision history should one be necessary (someday you may have to prove that you created the game and arrived at the version in question through a series of quantifiable revisions, and not through the copying of someone else's work).

Another method for protecting would be to have a Notary Public officer notarize your rules providing you with a legally recognized date stamp. Most large companies have their own Notaries on staff that will notarize just about anything for a small fee.

Of course, if you're paying a fee, why not just fill out the form and send it in for full copyright registration?

Z-Man,
Yes, I meant registered mail not certified. Its been a while since I looked at it. Thanks.

Anyway, I went over to the USPS site and it says that registered mail must be presented to a retail employee at a post office. I doubt that they would allow you to send a registered package that was not sealed; that would defeat the purpose of registered mail. Of course, this is the US; however, i would suspect that other countries postal systems have some similar services.

I would also think that some of the private carriers (e.g,. UPS, FedEx, etc) would have secured package handling.

As I said in my original note, I am not an attorney and you would have to check local laws on the viability of this standing up in court.