Important Copywriting question

[DomainEmpire.com]

Hi all,

We're just starting a new venture as "real newbies": we're putting together a small team of developers and graphic designers, we want to develop a set of high quality and professional flash games playable freely online (nothing new in this concept except for the innovative ideas behind our games).

We've a clear and detailed plan related to multiple game stories, characters etc ... ready to be designed and developed but, is there a way to legally copyrighting our stories/characters and game elements in general ?

Ok, asking to our members to sign an NDA might be an idea but totally useless in case someone should not respect it and we should be unable to proof who resold some private details about our project to third parties while copyrighting anything in advance might safeguard better our investment.

From where should we start to do this ? We've all to learn here so any help would be highly appreciated, thanks.

 

[Fabbstar]

Just make sure you have all names, ideas, characters files time-stamped...for now. Don't spend any money on copyrighting, it'll burn a hole and the money would be better used marketing/developing the idea. By time-stamping I mean, as long as you can prove that yours is the earliest version of the idea then you're sort of covered. I'm a songwriter (marketing manager in my day job) and there have been some instances in the past where I've thought 'what if someone comes along and takes this song/idea'. Well the truth is, most ideas can be copied, so be aware of that. And there's almost nothing stopping someone taking a product idea or song that i've written and re-spinning it as their own. However, just so long as you can show an earlier time-stamp and/or a time/place where the idea could have been stolen, then that should cover you. By time-stamping I mean, checking the creation date for a MS Word file, or mailing the idea to yourself in a sealed envelope. By all means seek more advice in this forum but from what I've learnt in marketing, songwriting...pretty much everything is replicable...but take comfort in knowing that not all are technically set up or have the time/persistence that you have to make it work. Just go ahead and do it I say!

 

[Jeroen]

You may want to lookup the 'Berne Convention'

 

[Tia Wood]

"Ok, asking to our members to sign an NDA might be an idea"

Do you mean asking your site members or developers/graphic designers to sign NDA?

 

[DomainEmpire.com]

Thanks for your wise and clear advice Fabbstar, I think we'll follow your suggestions so we'll ask to our designers and developers to save daily screenshots of their job since the first day of their new job (we should start in few days), this might safeguard us at least in part.
At the same time, asking them to sign an NDA, should further safeguard our ownership rights over the games.

It's a good start, we'll improve our copyright techniques with the time and the experience.

Probably taking a look at the Berne convention might give us some additional ideas too , we'll do