12 August 2021
Play: our guide to the video games industry – 4 of 4 Insights
The value of a game is usually in its intellectual property rights (IPRs), and protection is critical to maximising commercial reward and preventing others from trading off your creative product, brand reputation, and technological innovations. Having the correct IPR protection adds significant value in a potential sale and opens up potentially lucrative revenue streams through licensing to third parties.
On the flip side, care is needed to ensure that you have the right permissions to use IPRs that you do not own to avoid inadvertently infringing someone else's rights. This could result in your having to withdraw or significantly rewrite games and pay monetary compensation to the IPR owner, as well as damage to your reputation.
Developing a proactive and agile IPR strategy to protect and secure appropriate rights is essential to enable the successful development, financing, and distribution of games.
This article explains the core IPRs that protect games, who owns them, and additional considerations raised by user-generated content. For more information on this topic, including how to enforce your IPRs against third party infringers, the line between permitted inspiration and infringement, and steps to ensure you do not infringe yourself, download the full Play guide here.
Games comprise several elements which are protectable by international IPRs. The same elements of a game could be protected by multiple IPRs. The main types of IPR that protect games in the UK are:
In most cases in the UK, when employees develop IPRs during their employment, the employer will automatically own the IPRs. When outside consultants or contractors develop IPRs, a signed, written contract is needed to transfer ownership to the business. If IPRs are developed before a company is set up or by a third-party studio, the developer may hold ownership.
It is best practice to enter into signed contracts with employees, consultants, and any necessary third parties at an early stage. Those contracts should expressly set out who owns any IPRs already in existence and state that any IPRs created in the future are automatically assigned to the business.
Crucially, external developers will own the IPRs in games unless they assign them formally to publishers.
Additional IPR considerations apply when games feature user-generated content. The ownership of user-generated content should be provided for in user terms and conditions. Publishers that make user-generated content available online may be responsible for users' infringement of third party IPRs if they are aware of the infringement (eg through a notification from the relevant third party), and do not take the infringing content down.
These are just some of the considerations around intellectual property rights; find out more in our Play guide.
Download the guide
22 June 2021
by Multiple authors
12 August 2021
by Mark Owen, Xuyang Zhu