Research Paper : Copyrights and Licensing.

There is a vast difference between gaming and the game development industry. Most people generally assumes games to be of minor significance and something which is a very closed zone. But the fact is that, the gaming industry was introduced and managed to strongly plant its roots into the consumer market from around the 1970s. currently Game industry had reached a scale were it generates revenue even more what box-office does. As of now in 2020, the value of the game industry in us alone is roughly around 60.4bn (statista, 2021). So if there is a lot to gain, there also lot to loose; so laws and legalities were passed and put into place to protect the right and ownership.

Copyrights

Protection of Character : A character developed by a company can be copyrighted so that the company can restrict the development or usage of their character by another entity for to generate financial gain. for example, the character named Mario. who has been copyrighted by Nintendo and vests the rights till 2080 (Joy & Wadhwa, 2021).

Protection of Game Play : game play can be defined is the sum of the interactive possibilities and the collection of objectives and mechanics offered by a game. there are laws in place to protect the game play as well, which guarantees the protection of gameplay, the story of the game and the main objectives present in the game (Joy & Wadhwa, 2021).

Protection of Sounds and Music :

As we know, video games are an audio visual phenomena, where sounds like music, sound effects, voice lines all play some narrative or confirmative role to help with the immersion that the user is intended to feel. The company that creates/uses the music can copyright the music so that the unlicensed usage would leads to legal charges against the preparator. and if some one want to use the Audio asset they need to get provide the Royalty to the content creator (Joy & Wadhwa, 2021).

Protection of Artwork and Visual Design : There is no video games without art. Art assets and visual design is one of the most quintessential elements of every IP out there. So its fair to say that Art and design used in a game has a major role in defining the identity of the product. But its has its limits, such that anything that's very general and is not specific to a game cannot be copyrighted." Such as a war themed game would have weapons and other forms of artillery. If such elements are copyrighted then no other war game would ever be made."(Joy & Wadhwa, 2021).

Protection of Code :

In software development most of all what there exist follows as down to up layering principle. by which I what I am saying is that simpler elements are combined to create complex structures and so one. so copy righting code is even more of a legal challenge but the simple rule out there anything such as libraries, case/product specific architectures or some sort of engine/solution created to solve/enable a certain feature can be copy righted, while everything that are far general cannot be. Licensing

Speaking about licensing, there are mainly 5 types of software licenses which can be generally found in use. four of them are some form of open source while the last one is a license that prohibits reuse of the code. Public Domain is the most open and free license which literally has no restriction regarding usage, modification, propagation or redistribution. But any software that doesn't provide you a license doesn't inherently fall into a public domain. Permissive License also know as Apache license or BSD License, MIT License can be also considered as a variant. This license provides lots of freedom while only exerting a very minimal restrictions regarding the use and distribution of the software. Most of the opensource licenses would fall into there category. LGPL/ GNU Lesser General Public License allows the user apply any form of licensing to their product given that the user did not modify or alter the library which come under LGPL. if it does, in that case the software must be distributed under the LGPL license as well. Copyleft License demands the derivative that came as result of modification to a source code or library should also inherit the attributes and limitations the original license the library/source code initially had. The catch here is that the code/product can be modified as well by the user. Proprietary License is the most restrictive among the software licenses. The main purpose of the license is to preserve all the rights of modification and distribution to the developer. Most video games and computer applications falls under these category.

So in regards to our current project. The document provided below details all the software and the licenses that they come under.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1narDSlXgPLVaIxrz8IjRoRRBcxBQAYb4j4CgEHgjggo/edit

References

statista. (2021, Jan, 18). Video Game Industry - Statistics & Facts. statista. https://www.statista.com/topics/868/video-games/#:~:text=Video%20games%20are%20a%20billion,over%2077%20billion%20U.S.%20dollars.

Joy, M., & Wadhwa, R. (n.d.). Copyright in the Gaming Industry. New Delhi: SS Rana & Co. Retrieved from https://s3.amazonaws.com/documents.lexology.com/d459114d-677f-46f4-b91f-324337dfe6fc.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAVYILUYJ754JTDY6T&Expires=1618376540&Signature=GQP0hgZfyfhr1P9qe1Sa8RizjIc%3D

synopsys. (2020, April, 7). 5 types of software licenses you need to understand. synopsys. https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software-security/5-types-of-software-licenses-you-need-to-understand/

U.S. Copyright Office . (2018, October, 30). What is Copyright?[Video]. YouTube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukFl-siTFtg

DistroTube . (2020, January, 27). Free and Open Source Licenses[Video]. YouTube.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4GYrcca12c