No copyright on computer game ideas, Court of Appeal rules

 

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By Simon Aughton

Posted on 22 Mar 2007 at 11:25

Computer game developers are entitled to copy 'ideas' from other games without infringing copyright, the UK Court of Appeal has ruled.

Upholding an earlier High Court judgement, Lord Justice Jacob said that infringement only occurs where code or graphics are copied.

'Merely making a program which will emulate another but which in no way involves copying the program code or any of the program's graphics is legitimate,' he said.

The judge was ruling on a case brought by Nova Productions, which claimed that two other game developers had infringed its copyright by producing pool games using similar elements to its own Pocket Money.

Lord Justice Jacob concluded that although sequences in the two other games were similar to sequences in Pocket Money, those sequences are in fact a series of still images, not a single work in themselves.

'No-one would say that the copyright in a single drawing of Felix the Cat is infringed by a drawing of Donald Duck,' he said. 'A series of cartoon frames showing Felix running over a cliff edge into space, looking down and only then falling would not be infringed by a similar set of frames depicting Donald doing the same thing. That is in effect what is alleged here.'

He explained that copyright only gives protection in specific instances.

'Not all of the skill which goes into a copyright work is protected - the obvious example being the skill involved in creating an invention, which is then described in a literary work,' he said. 'An idea consisting of a combination of ideas is still just an idea. That is as true for ideas in a computer program as for any other copyright work.'

Law firm Pinsents Masons has more details of the ruling at Out-law.com.