>Fight for your Rights
>In my last post, I talked about the value of protecting the intellectual property in your characters. In this post, I want to talk about the other side of the negotiating table: where you are...
View Article>Tip: Spinning out of Control
>As companies consider spinning off subsidiaries or divisions (read: developers), generally in an effort to get a cash infusion or to sell off an underperforming portion of its business, it is...
View Article>Tip: Bankruptcy — The Economy Says You Can’t Ignore It
>Ok… who remembers this: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Left, B, A, Start? The hard-core (old-school) gamers should instantly spot the typographical error in this classic Contra cheat code....
View Article>Tip: Contracts and the Right to Set-off
>As you may or may not have seen, Valve Corporation filed suit against Activision Blizzard, Inc. on April 28, 2009. The subject matter of the long-standing dispute is about royalties, audits, and...
View Article>Clickwrap Agreements and the iPhone
>I was thinking about this issue the other day as a potential blog posting, but now that I’ve sat down to write the post, this may be deserving of an entire paper. Clickwrap/browsewrap/shrinkwrap...
View Article>Potential New Implied Software License Warranty
>The American Law Institute has issued a proposed final draft on the “Principles of Law of Software Contracts” (click here to obtain a copy). In this draft, the ALI seeks to provide (suggested)...
View Article>Software licenses, assignability, and mergers
>A new case was handed down out of the Sixth Circuit last week that dealt with software licensing. In this case, a company had licensed some software, and the license agreement contained some of the...
View Article>Implied Licenses with Software Developers
>An interesting opinion denying a preliminary injunction in a software development case has just come out of the Eastern District of Washington. The defendant company, bVisual, was sued for...
View Article>Bethesda Sues Interplay Over Fallout IP Purchase
>The purchase of intellectual property is always a complicated transaction, which can easily blow up on the participants if not handled carefully. Bethesda Softworks found how easily things can go...
View Article>Nintendo Settles Wii Remote Claims; "Rock Band" Defendants File to Advance...
>The end of October brought a flurry of legal activity relevant to two of the more notable segments of the current generation of video game technology: Nintendo has finally settled out of a U.S....
View Article>Activision Sued by Rock Band No Doubt Over In-Game Avatars
>Having only recently rid itself of Gibson Guitar Corp.’s Guitar Hero-based patent infringement lawsuit, Activision probably expected to be able to put away the aspirin for a while. Instead, the...
View Article>Court rules Apple software is only licensed on Apple hardware
>As we have been covering, Apple brought a suit asserting copyright infringement stemming from PsyStar’s sales of non-Apple-Labeled computers with Apple’s operating system. This case presents...
View Article>Hasbro and Atari Duel over a Licensing Spat
>Hasbro, the owner of the venerable Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property has brought suit against Atari, seeking to terminate Atari’s rights to develop video games based on Dungeons &...
View Article>Don’t Ignore Open Source License Terms
>If you embed open source software in a retail game or in gaming hardware, you should be diligent about compliance with the open source license terms. Otherwise, both you and your retailer may be in...
View Article>Tip: IP Indemnification
>As patent and other intellectual property lawsuits continue to litter the video game landscape, it makes a mind wander to one of everyone’s favorite clauses in developer and publisher agreements:...
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