Richmond wrote: > I would like, initially to market it in the form of either plastic or > card tiles in a box. > > Later on I might make a LiveCode game with it, using a commercial > version of LiveCode. > > In the latter case I would want to make sure that another company > would be discouraged from making a clone of the game - i.e. ripping > off the idea rather than stealing the code.
I am not a lawyer, and specific vary by jurisdiction, but my lay understanding is that in the States one cannot copyright an idea, only the manifest expression of an idea, such as code.
Protection for broader concerns like design may require a design patent, which is not only expensive to get but many orders of magnitude more expensive to enforce. And even when you have pockets as deep as the wealthiest and most powerful multinational on earth, Apple, the reliability of a design patent is at best specious: Apple has lost as many design patent assertions as they've gained, in some jurisdictions some of their design patents have been dismissed by the court and in others ruled completely invalid.
Watching Apple v Samsung unfold around the world in so many jurisdictions has been very educational. Indeed, even Apple and Samsung have agreed to a truce calling off all outstanding suits in all jurisdictions outside the one remaining pending case in US, where damages were dropped significantly once again just last week as the court dismissed yet another design patent from the mix.
Design patents are a rich man's game, a high-risk gamble for everyone involved with only one sure winner: any attorney on either side of such a suit, where fees can easily creep into the millions over the months and sometimes years it can take to complete such a suit and subsequent appeals.
-- Richard Gaskin Fourth World Systems Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web ____________________________________________________________________ ambassa...@fourthworld.com http://www.FourthWorld.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
