Well, at least in this particular case (a card game). It appears you need to patent your mechanics to protect them from cloning. Exactly what this means for a traditional TT RPGs isn't obvious from the summary, though I suspect you better have a large litigation budget if you try it against Hasbro.
http://www.strebecklaw.com/court-rules- ... right-law/
So you can't protect your game mechanics with copyright
Moderator: Moderators
-
Username17
- Serious Badass
- Posts: 29894
- Joined: Fri Mar 07, 2008 7:54 pm
As they mention at the beginning, this isn't a change in the way copyright works. You haven't been able to copyright game mechanics since, well, ever. People have been making games with six stats and d20s and hit dice since the mid seventies and TSR was powerless to do anything but rage. Gygax went to court several times and ended up losing I think every damn time because he never got a good grasp on what intellectual property does and does not cover.
So he lost when Tolkien sued over Hobbits, because Tolkien owns Hobbits. He lost when he tried to claim Dungeons & Dragons was a different trademark from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to screw Arneson out of royalties. He lost when he tried to make Dangerous Dimensions with the same basic logo as Dungeons and Dragons.
Trademark protects logos and proper names.
Copyright protects exact text.
Patents protect procedures.
Trademarks and Copyrights can be informal. You can register your works with the government and this makes it easier to win court cases, but you don't literally have to. If you write a story about Bogasa Himori, Wizard Detective, and someone else puts a Bogasa Himori, Wizard Detective into their story, that is an infringement on your trademark for as long as you are still writing and/or selling Bogasa Himori stories. And you can sue on that basis even if you never got around to registering her as a trademark with any agency. Similarly, if someone plagiarizes your actual document and replaces all the names with Frealise Moonsaber, Sorcerer Investigator, that's a violation of Copyright (though not of trademark). Again, you can take them to court.
But Patents cannot be informal. You either have a registered patent or you do not. They are expensive and difficult to register and maintain, and it's difficult for me to imagine any patent involving tabletop gameplay elements standing up in court. The standards in patents are much higher than they are for Copyrights or Trademarks. Rolling a d20, adding your bonuses, and comparing it to an armor class is the kind of thing that could be patented (but not copyrighted or trademarked), but no one has and I doubt anyone could get such a patent to stick.
So basically you could release the entirety of Vampire: the Masquerade, so long as you didn't use any of the specific clan names and wrote your own prose. But White Wolf could sue you for putting out a d20 supplement with wizard vampires that happened to be called Tremere.
-Username17
-Username17
So he lost when Tolkien sued over Hobbits, because Tolkien owns Hobbits. He lost when he tried to claim Dungeons & Dragons was a different trademark from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons to screw Arneson out of royalties. He lost when he tried to make Dangerous Dimensions with the same basic logo as Dungeons and Dragons.
Trademark protects logos and proper names.
Copyright protects exact text.
Patents protect procedures.
Trademarks and Copyrights can be informal. You can register your works with the government and this makes it easier to win court cases, but you don't literally have to. If you write a story about Bogasa Himori, Wizard Detective, and someone else puts a Bogasa Himori, Wizard Detective into their story, that is an infringement on your trademark for as long as you are still writing and/or selling Bogasa Himori stories. And you can sue on that basis even if you never got around to registering her as a trademark with any agency. Similarly, if someone plagiarizes your actual document and replaces all the names with Frealise Moonsaber, Sorcerer Investigator, that's a violation of Copyright (though not of trademark). Again, you can take them to court.
But Patents cannot be informal. You either have a registered patent or you do not. They are expensive and difficult to register and maintain, and it's difficult for me to imagine any patent involving tabletop gameplay elements standing up in court. The standards in patents are much higher than they are for Copyrights or Trademarks. Rolling a d20, adding your bonuses, and comparing it to an armor class is the kind of thing that could be patented (but not copyrighted or trademarked), but no one has and I doubt anyone could get such a patent to stick.
So basically you could release the entirety of Vampire: the Masquerade, so long as you didn't use any of the specific clan names and wrote your own prose. But White Wolf could sue you for putting out a d20 supplement with wizard vampires that happened to be called Tremere.
-Username17
-Username17