Legal Issues in games

When it comes to creating a game, a lot of game developers are going to come across dealing with legal issues. Like ethical issues, these are a pretty big deal in the games industry. An example a legal issues is copyright. Taking a game, or the title of a game and saying it's yours is a pretty big deal. Most of the time, if this is done in a different country that the original owner is unlikely to find out that their product has been stolen/copied, the culprit can usually get away. But for the most part, you will get found out. An example of this was when Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft, wanted to make a game called Scrolls. However, Bethesda Softworks, the makers of the franchise The Elder Scrolls did not like this, as they thought the name was too similar to their franchise name, and sued Persson for copyright. Persson actually challenged Bethesda to a Quake 3 tournament for the name, but unfortunately that didn't happen, and the case was taken to court. In the end, Persson was able to call his game Scrolls but was not allowed to create a franchise called Scrolls, as that was going a bit too far. As you can see, copyright in gaming is a big issue, even if the name of a game isn't fully copied.

One of the biggest legal problems the game industry encounters is the issue of piracy, where fake copies of a game are created, and a lot of times sold. This can be done by creating MODs of a game, or emulating a game onto a disc or cartridge. One of the biggest and most famous examples was the release of Tetris. In June 1984, the game was created by Alexey Pajitnov who lived in Soviet Union Russia. After creating copies of the game for some other people to play, the Soviet Union managed to get there hands on it, claiming it their property with them having all the rights to the game. Originally, they did not want to sell the game any where outside of their country, but after a few years ended up selling their product outside the Soviet Union. The two companies who were desperate for Tetris the most were Nintendo and Atari. Atari had already made millions of copies of Tetris, as they assumed they already had the rights to the game. But after court battles with Nintendo, Atari lost the rights to sell the game, and ended up having to destroy all copies of Tetris they had created. After their victory, Nintendo became an even bigger success, selling over 100 million copies throughout the Tetris franchise. But after almost 30 years, and the huge success Tetris became, Alexey Pajitnov still received nothing from his creation, with Nintendo and the Soviet Union taking all the money Tetris made. This just shows how dangerous privacy can be in the games industry, and it still is an ongoing issue.

Legal issues such as copyright and privacy are still big problems in the games industry today, and will still be in the future. There are still cases now of people emulating fake copies of games onto a computer then onto a storage device like a disc or cartridge, then selling them, meaning the companies of that game will profit with their game being sold illegally. And there isn't much the companies can do about this. With more and more games being created, more and more games will also be copied and emulated. Games that are unknown in other places that are copied can also be stolen under the thief's name, which makes it even harder for people outside of that area, like what happened to Alexey Pajitnov.