How Video Game Patents Can Help Developers
Intellectual property is a core tenet of the video game industry. After all, a lot of work goes into everything from logos to console, and all the way down to game mechanics. It makes rational sense for video game developers, and publishers to protect the assets they spent a lot of resources to research and develop. Naturally, patenting in the video game industry has a long history with the first one dating back to 1947.
Despite the security that patenting offers, and the industry's long history with patents, they have hardly had a good reputation in the gaming community at-large. Between accusations of gate keeping, anticompetitive practices, and lack of specificity, patents have become a divisive issue. Yet, being a recognized legal document, patents remain the best way to protect intellectual property, and the failure to patent can lead to unfortunate consequences.
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Patents are a type of intellectual property that grant exclusive rights to an invention. They can either be for a product or a process that elaborate a novel way of doing something, or solves a problem that hasn't been solved before. Those rights include the exclusion of anyone other than the patent holder, whether a physical or moral person, to create, use, or sell an invention for a limited period of time. In exchange, the owner of the patent discloses the invention to the wider public.
Per the World Trade Organization's TRIPS Agreement, governments of any member state should issue patents in all fields of technology as long as they are new, and have an industrial application. Patents are also territorial, so they are only effective in the country they were issued in. Article 33 of
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