Copyrighting in London?

[Frost]

Hello,

I've just finished writing my RPG, and now I intend to launch it into free open beta. However, before I do that, I want to protect my work, so I'm looking into copyrighting the thing. I have no lawyer friends, and I'm quite clueless about the whole process.

I'm paranoid that if I take my life's work to the wrong place, they'll sell it off to the highest bidder.


As the thread title suggest, I'm London based. So, is there any advice anyone can give for copyrighting my work in London?


Also, I've glossed over a few lawfirms which sound good enough, but then again, they might just be bogus. I'm reticent to post them here (it's easy to create a google alert for your lawfirm name or url and just go there), but I can PM to somebody if they're willing to help out.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Right, I'll try to help you out a bit. I tried to write succintly, but I'm having difficulty picturing where you're coming from with your somewhat peculiar request, so the following might be unnecessarily wordy. Don't get offended if I sound flippant, I'm just being slightly amused by the premise of your question.

The first thing to note is that you already have a copyright in the UK regardless of any registration or other legal protection. It's automatic. However, note that the source of this information I just gave is the Internet, which is useless if you're exercising your paranoia this fine day; I'm just a guy here in Finland writing this, not an authority that guarantees the advice you get in any way. You need to decide what level of guarantee you want in the world you exist in, and where you place your trust. I would say that most sane people will have reasonable trust in commonly known things like the above factoid after they hear it from two or three independent sources, but who knows, I could still be wrong - maybe the copyright police will come and whisk you away if you publish something without registering it with the Crown office?

OK, maybe I need to tone down the irony a bit. To put this simply, you will probably be able to trust entirely ordinary encyclopedia information like the Wikipedia on such common topics as copyright in the United Kingdom. If you feel like that article is too much for you, then I definitely encourage you to get help from some more worldly friends, who might in turn help you choose an affordable attorney, who may then advice you on how to proceed. Most people do not need legal help to simply work in the culture industry, but if you have an extremely shaky understanding of the laws of the land where you live, then it's not a bad idea to build up your knowledge by asking a lawyer, or getting some courses on the topic, or buckling up and reading up on trustworthy-seeming Internet sources.

However, let's assume that you are neither paranoid, nor particularly in need of hand-holding. In this case the first thing you need to know and understand is that the culture industry simply does not operate off the sort of paranoid paradigm you suggest in your post: there is no secret cabal out there that makes a living by stealing roleplaying game manuscripts and passing them off as their own. Creative work is automatically under copyright protection in all civilized nations today. It is an ordinary, common and commendable thing in indie culture circles to share your work and ideas with others to build connections, make a name for yourself and improve your work with feedback. Again, nobody's going to steal your work: that's a practically infeasible scenario, nobody has a reason to do it. These statements are all true to the best of my knowledge, standard in the cottage industry that is rpg authoring, and we can discuss each of them in detail if you'd like.

Moving on, what are the practical conclusions? First, you need to decide if you're going to do public playtesting. The benefit is attention and playtest data, the drawback is that you might make a bad impression on the potential market with an unfinished product. If you are going to do public playtesting, then go and do it - there is no legal trickery that will protect you, and there are no particular legal hazards either out there, if I'm allowed to rely on my own experience of the world. You can put a copyright declaration in your manuscript where you advice the reader on how you wish the work to be used, but even that's pretty much voluntary.

(A side question: if paranoid practices do not exist, why do big companies have you sign non-disclosure agreements? The answer is fiscal responsibility: the people working for the company are responsible to shareholders for even unlikely negative scenarios. If they do e.g. a public playtest of a highly visible A-list game, and some playtesters talk about the game in media in such a way that this hurts the game's publicity profile prior to the launch, then that's the fault of the company operator who let that outside playtester get access. If you think about this, you'll understand that these sorts of concerns have absolutely nothing to do with you, and thus you should not take your cue on how to deal with publicity from publicly traded entertainment industry firms.)

The next practical conclusion you need to accept sooner or later is going to be that people don't care as much as you think. Your game might be your life's work, but it's just not going to be that amazing to somebody else. Nobody's first game is. Once you get the fact that your challenge as an author in culture industry is getting attention, then you realize that having your work stolen is a ridiculous concern: if you're an author whose work is worthy of being stolen, then you've already passed the greatest and most fearsome hurdles to being successful. This goes for all levels of stealing from the frankly soap opera -like illegal publication scenario to the more commonplace Internet piracy: if you're so good that somebody wants to steal your work, you're already better off than the 95% who can't get others to read their stuff by giving it away for free!

Any further advice would depend on your exact publishing plans, but if you're going to publish in the ordinary indie manner (put a product together yourself, perhaps print some, then sell it in digital and print form as your own publishing company), then you'll likely never have to worry about your own copyright or other IP rights on any practical level. I've published several games over the years myself, doing the work from start to finish, and I've never needed even the scent of a lawyer. Basic knowledge of my country's intellectual property laws more than suffices for me, and it seems for most other indie publishers as well.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Oh, one more practical thing about copyright that you might not know: the point of copyright is not to have some big database that identifies the proper owner of each single piece of writing out there. Rather, the legal procedure in examining a copyright violation case is that whoever can prove that they're the original creator of a work is the first and primary copyright holder. (One way to prove this is having your name in a national registration database, of course, if such exists, but it's a clumsy and unnecessarily heavy system.) You can sell some or all of your rights to the work to others, but the first question is always: who made this?

What this means is that if you want to particularly protect your copyright against these imaginary rpg-stealing rogues, the first step is to establish that you're in fact the original creator of your own work. Putting your own name on the work - attributing it - is the basic way to do this. Very rarely would you need to do anything else, frankly.

Also, a second thing you might not know about copyright: copyright laws in different countries protect specific expression, not ideas. This means that most substantial creative work that goes into game design is not protected in any way by copyright law. For example, if I get access to your game (by buying it, say), I could write my own game that uses the same exact rules and processes, and that would not be a copyright violation. Copyright only protects the expression - the words and phrasings, and perhaps the overall structure of the work - not the game design.

(If you're wondering whether there is any legal protection available for "ideas", the answer is yes. It's called "patenting", and the laws related to it tend to vary by jurisdiction. I do not recommend worrying about patenting your game, as the vast majority of game design is not patent-worthy in originality, and it's a lurid misapplication of IP law anyway to try to patent game concepts. Besides, patenting is more complex and expensive than other IP forms, so it's not worth to consider unless you're sitting on a multimillion-dollar game design.)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi, and welcome! First, I'd like to direct your attention to a thread at the Forge from a little while ago, Making a game, and the links embedded within it. The poster "ssem" entered the thread boiling with confusion and hostility, obsessed with an extreme version of the concern you've raised here. A number of us tried pretty hard to show that (i) after a solid 20 years of independent RPG publishing, an instance of theft such as everyone fears has yet to occur, and (ii) the various bugaboo stories that instill such fear among gamers didn't actually occur the way people think.

One point more specific to your post: there are no "highest bidders" for game ideas. You can try to give your role-playing work away to gaming companies for years and they won't want it. The idea that they'd bid to pay for it is pretty funny. (I am not speaking here about card and board games, just RPGs.)

Second, I wanted to clarify some phrasing which often gets used in these discussions, in your post for example. The phrase is "to protect my work." To get to a sensible and useful discussion of copyright and similar issues, that phrase must be discarded. Why? Because nothing protects your work, or anyone else's . If someone were brazenly to try to use your work as theirs (which remains entirely fanciful, as I said above) ... why, they will. They'll just do it.

Therefore copyright isn't about protection but rather steps you might take regarding infringement on work you've done and can lay a claim to based on existing evidence, if this unlikely event were to occur.

That's important for two reasons. First, your concern is about a very unlikely event, in fact historically without any need for fear, and therefore we can talk about it without stress and urgency. Very different from the paranoia you mentioned.

Second, and crucially, this becomes all about actual existing work, not work you're merley thinking about. This is one of the reasons I insist that discussions in this forum refer to an external source with demonstrated work there.

To put it in a way most relevant to you, the more secret and hidden and "protected" you keep your work, the more likely it is that your hypothetical thief can use it and get away with it, not less. The best way to guard against such work is to make it publicly available in your name, to demonstrate active development, and to promote its use by others in its current form. That means when your shadowy and wicked imaginary thief comes along and publishes a game which all but features your author credit smeared with white-out, you have a whole body of direct evidence, and your "cease and desist" letter will carry genuine threat.

In the States, we could talk all about copyright, trademark, registered trademark, the amorphous concept of intellectual property, and related things. What the equivalents or alternatives in the UK are, I don't know. However, some publishers there frequent this forum and will probably let you know more about how they handled their business.

What matters to me, though, is that you can turn off the stress-response. You aren't surrounded by wicked thieves and high bidders, and by the time your work is complete and available enough to be attractive to such people (if they existed), then its existing material precedence is already your best defense.

Best, Ron

[Ron Edwards]

Oh yeah ... Eero, take it easy on people. They've been exposed to disinformation and rumor, and they shouldn't be teased. You weren't so different not too long ago.

Best, Ron

[Frost]

Thanks for the quick reply guys.

I believe that my paranoia is not without foundation:

1. To my knowledge, they kind of fucked over both Gygax and Arneson.

2. I grew up in Eastern Europe, where it's a dog eat dog world, even among the intellectuals.In essence, I grew up with no faith in man.

3. Nikola Tesla

While not specific to RPGs, the last two do refer to intellectual property. But I'll take Eero's advice and try to relax my sphincter for the few seconds it takes for further explanations.

Truth is, the thread title is a bit misleading. I'm looking to protect my work from copyright infringement internationally.

What I've built (the book is already written) is a generic RPG system with simple rules that are adaptableto any setting. The rules need streamlining and testing, but otherwise the system is better than GURPS, and it's on par with Big Eyes Small Mouth/Tri-Stat RPG if not superior(Of course, I might just be delusional, but then again, what if I'm not?).

I'm planning to put my game online for absolutely free. Anyone can download it and play it. The only thing preventing me from doing that right now is fear of losing my life's work.

From what you guys are tell me, what I need to do is to insure I can prove in a court of law that I was the first to write it. I've found a british lawfirm that can hold the original in their digital archives and provide me with an affidavit


So, further information?

Again, thanks for the quick replies and all the help.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Oh yeah ... Eero, take it easy on people. They've been exposed to disinformation and rumor, and they shouldn't be teased. You weren't so different not too long ago.

I know, and I'm sorry - it came out more frivolous than I intended it. I tried to write that as straightforwardly as I could, but it came out strange because I kept speculating about Frost's background - what age he is and so on - and then the text twisted into a pile of speculation. What we ultimately got was my further attempt at untwisting the irony into reasonably straight answers. My only defense is that my intention was good, and I'm not laughing at Frost so much as being clever in lieu of being dismissive.

But anyway, Frost - good to hear back from you.

I strongly suggest that on the basis of what you've written here, you simply don't know enough about this topic to have an opinion. This is OK - everybody starts out ignorant. What is important that we need to figure out how much you need to know, about what, and how much work you're willing to put into figuring things out. I mean, I could just tell you to go browse the Internet for a few months, reading up on IP law, the history of plagiarism in the game industry, and the best practices of rpg publishing. This would basically give you the background for this sort of thing, as you'd read through different people's experiences and opinions and arguments, and then you'd be able to sieve through the false knowledge by comparing it with the good. However, all that might be too much work, depending on your overall plans with your rpg hobby. I mean, you will have to learn all of the things I mentioned if you're going to be doing game design and publishing long-term, but it will come naturally over time if you'll just start doing it, and follow your natural interests.

I'm sure that Ron will soon come in and tell you that if you don't understand copyright law, then you've got no place claiming that either Gary Gygax or Dave Arneson would have been somehow fucked over by copyright trickery. I'll just leave that for now.

Instead, let's think about the realistic scale of the things we're discussing here. If I tell you that a scam needs to be profitable to be worth doing, you'd agree with me, right? This in turn means that it only makes sense to steal and cheat people when it either has a very low risk and cost (like Nigerian email scams), or the payoff is going to be large. From how you write about your game it seems to me that you might be misestimating your game's value by at least one order of magnitude. You are also clearly underestimating the amount of danger and expense anybody would have in stealing a game design.

I'll tackle this in detail. Let's assume that you follow our advice and then later this year somebody decides to steal your game off the Internet. They'll take your manuscript that you've been distributing to people on Google+ or whatever. They decide that this is a brilliant game, and then they - let's call them "the Rogue" for clarity's sake - then the Rogue cleans up the draft, changes a few words here and there, and publishes the game as their own. Everything would happen just like you feared, and you would be left out in the cold!

However, here are some things wrong with this scenario:
- You would be the copyright-holder. You could therefore sue the Rogue for damages, profits and whatnot. It would be pretty simple for you to prove your primary copyright if you had been distributing your manuscript for playtest purposes or whatever before. They would be utterly fucked. Note that if they are selling your game, they will have an address, and they can be reached by the law, assuming you care enough to pursue the matter.
- The culture industry relies on good reputation in many ways, and the rpg hobby is especially socially connected. In the past publishers and other commercial actors who have acted unethically have suffered massive public relations damage when word of their mischief has come out. There have been some plagiarism cases in the mix, too. (I'm specifically thinking of that company that kept selling other people's Tunnels & Trolls art as their own or something like that, a few years back.) Nobody in the industry believes that it's a good idea to run your own reputation to the ground even if the matter never goes to the law; such a publisher would ensure that they'd never be able to work in the industry in the future. The rpg hobby is generally a pretty slow-moving and sedate thing, nobody gets quick profits and then "skips town".
- The Rogue would have to do editing, layout, art, book production to make your manuscript into an actual commercial product they could sell. That's a lot of work! Question: are you going to do a lot of work on somebody else's game that you're publishing illegally? Why not instead do that same work on your own game, or one of the multitude of entirely free games that are out there just waiting for somebody to commercialize them?
- The commercial returns in the rpg hobby are extremely borderline nowadays. If your information on the scale of the hobby is from the '80s, then update yourself forthwith. The typical small press game using the established best practices sells some hundreds of copies. A typical product from a "real" company might sell a few thousand when successful. Only the top few companies (basically Wizards of the Coast and Paizo, and whoever's the third-most popular this season) will sell over 10 000 copies of a roleplaying game product, and even those will only manage it for their flagship titles. How much work and risk will the Rogue take for the sake of 5000 dollars in profit, at best?
- If the Rogue is smart, they're not going to publish your game word-by-word. Instead, they will rewrite the manuscript while retaining the ideas. It's still going to be a lot of work, and the expected profits won't make anybody rich, and people will likely still get mad if they really will just plagiarize you - but it would be legal! There is nothing that you can do about the fact that people are allowed to take influence from each other's works. That's a part of the exchange of culture, and a part that I for one cherish. And the most important point: the Rogue could do this deed after you publish your game, and it would still be just as legal. It's unavoidable, if the Rogue is out there the only thing you can do to avoid him is to never publish your work. And to top that off, the cherry on this cake is as follows: the Rogue is never going to do this copying trick to your game! Why would he - he can copy Dungeons & Dragons, the world's most popular roleplaying game. Or any other rpg out there, for that matter.

To sum that scenario up: the presumed Rogue who would steal your game would be taking a legal risk, nobody would buy the shithead's product once the word got out, they would have to do a lot of work to publish, and the profits would still even at best be even less than what you'd get by mass-mailing Nigerian scams to random email addresses. And to top that off, the Rogue obviously will just go and steal some actually successful game instead of your unproven, unknown game.

I can do little about it if you decide to not believe me on the above. (I suppose I could tell you to google my name and all that to verify that I know what I'm talking about, but I'd like it better if the argument itself was convincing.) You might have such a different background in the world that the fear of intellectual property theft weights heavily on you. However, if you truly think that the world we live in is such that rpg copyright theft is a real and genuine risk, then surely it'll make sense to affirm this impression with at least one case study? Please go out and find one rpg designer who has actually been cheated of their rights because they did not "protect themselves" legally. If this is a thing that exists, then surely you can point us to such a case? I don't want to hoist unnecessary work on you, but I genuinely don't know how I could find this example case myself. I think that we could all learn a great deal if we could e.g. ask the person in question to come in and answer some question for us. They could tell us what they did wrong, and what you should do to avoid the problems they had.

(Note that just citing "Gygax and Arneson" is not enough. It's not just that neither of them was actually a target of copyright theft, but also that you should at least find an article or book or just a blog post or even a forum discussion where somebody actually explains the details and claims that copyright theft occurred. Half-forgotten rumours are weak-sauce.)

I could also say a few things about international copyright protection, but the above topic seems more important, really. The thing to know about international copyright protection is that it only exists in the form of national copyright laws. There's no magic trick to make yourself more protected in some random foreign country, the only way to defend your rights internationally is to watch the global culture industry like a hawk and then sue possible Rogues in the country they operate in. It should be absolutely obvious that this is not the course of action for a small press publisher, as the expenses of legal action far outweight the value of the property involved; the small press publisher relies on the above reasons for why it makes not a whit of sense for the Rogue to exist. As the Rogue does not exist, nobody's stolen any of my games so far and published unauthorized Chinese pirate runs - at least that I know of, anyway.

Another topic we could also talk about is your expectations for your game. I mean, I'm an optimistic guy who loves new games, but I'm literally going to eat my socks if your game is actually so amazingly better than everybody else's that paranoia over commercial rights is warranted. (You understand that you're not exactly the first person I've encountered who thinks very highly of their game, right?) I'm not saying that you shouldn't take pride in your work, but even a substantially fresh, new-thinking roleplaying game is just not so valuable commercially that it'd require any special protection. It's in many ways like worrying that somebody's going to steal your garden gnome if you leave it out in the garden at night.

I've actually got a simple culture industry value test for you: given that the really successful people in the culture industry (doesn't matter what media - this goes for rpgs, books, movies, whatever) are known for consistently excellent, imaginative and beautiful work, how much do you think that a professional worries about a single magnum opus they might have created? The fact of the matter is pretty much that success depends on you being special, not any given work you do. For this reason I encourage first-time rpg publishers to think of their first game as a practice run, not the fulfillment of a life-long legend. If you've got what it takes, it wouldn't matter even if the Rogue did exist and you became the very first rpg author I know of who got their game stolen in this way; it would just be one game, not all of your hopes and dreams in a small manuscript. You could just take a year and write another one about as good as the first one, because the magic's in you, not your text. Thus, the test: if you truly believe that this particular game you have is magical, and you're not, then the likelyhood is that neither of you are. Grim, but true as far as I know. It does mean that you shouldn't worry about a single project too much, no matter how dear it is.

In case anything in the above seems credible at all to you, I would strongly suggest that you hold off on hiring a law firm at this point. It is likely unnecessary, and it's going to cut into the funds you're going to use to publish your game. (To be exact - the sort of lawyerly service you suggest is not entirely useless in this world, but it is overkill and misapplied work in this case; if you were a larger company working in say television production, then you might occasionally use a service like that. For individuals it's almost certainly just a matter of a lawyer taking advantage of paranoia.) Rather, if you'd like to learn more about this topic from a specifically British angle, how about getting onto the Collective Endeavour website - it's a small press roleplaying game publisher's circle in Great Britain, great guys all. They've been doing this for years, and they can tell you exactly what you need to know about the Britain-related practicalities of publishing your game. Heck, for all I know there is some weird UK-related legal nuance that they need to consider in publishing out there, something that I've just never heard of. If there is, the CE guys will know of it after publishing several dozen rpgs between them.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi, and Eero nailed it: check with the Collective Endeavour guys. They're friendly and knowledgeable.

I will speak immodestly for a minute. The dice system and associated concepts of my game Sorcerer have been described by many notable RPG designers and publishers as the single strongest mechanic available. I made it available free on the internet for years, before I published the game in book form. No one stole it. There's no speculation here; the mechanic and overall system are not only sound, they're superb. Nor was it obscure or hidden; even before the book came out Sorcerer was burning up the reviews in fanzines and the RPG sites of that time. If there were thieves out there trolling for good design so they can use it, they would have done it.

Regarding Gygax and Arneson ... Eero is also right that you sound like you're operating off second-hand subculture memes, not from knowledge. The thread I linked to includes a post of mine which explains the most egregious legal situation faced by Gygax from TSR, with links - it's not what people say, because TSR actually failed in their legal-bullying attempt to prevent him from publishing Dangerous Journeys. His work was only discontinued by his employers, GDW (Games Design Workshop) because they were weenies. (Gygax should have retained full ownership and independence, and thus been able to flip off TSR and continue writing ... that game was actually pretty good.)

Thanks for putting up with us, too - this can be a rough-edged place because a lot of us have seen one another's triumphs and failures, worked together, disagreed over stuff, found our way through, and now tolerate high levels of smacktalk among ourselves, just for fun.

Best, Ron

[Frost]

Your arguments seem sound enough, therefore I'm a bit less freaked out by the possibility of my work being stolen.

Thank you.

Still, I think I'm going for that affidavit thing, since it isn't that expensive. Juuuuuust to be sure.

After reading up on Ron's game, I don't think you guys will like my system. It's too mainstream. But if you want, once I've gone through the legal proceedings(might take a while, life's busy), I can post the link for the corebook here.

In any case, thanks again for all the advice, and best of luck on your endeavors!

[Ron Edwards]

Hey man, you're welcome!

Uh ... never mind whether you think I'll like your game. For one thing, you might be amazed at the range of games I like. For another, I may not be your target audience, but if I know who they are, I (and others) can still be helpful. This site isn't about flooding the world with games by others who meet some specific play-preference of mine  - or more bluntly, I'm working on that goal all by myself.

So post it when you're comfortable. Even if it makes me make the "Calvin gags" face, someone here'll be able to give you help.

Best, Ron
Couldn't get stupid image link to work. Google "Calvin gag face."