The GAVFX industry is like treading on ice when it comes to legal and regulatory process’s during the production and release of a product, there are a lot of grey areas that may be entered without the creator knowing it and any of the legal issues that may arise following the release.
An example of some legal issues are:
- Copyright content – Copyrighted content is content that has been produced by someone else and needs a license or the correct permissions to be used in the product you are making.
- Intellectual property – IP’s are entities that have been created, trademarked and copyrighted by an individual or company. Typically these are unique creations and can be transferred to different holders via purchase. An example would be Crash Bandicoot. Crash Bandicoot was an IP of Sony and Naughty Dog until it was sold off to Activision. if Activision wanted to make a game using Crash Bandicoot (LOL) without Naughty Dogs permission or owning the IP, they would have been sued by Naughty Dog and Sony for incorrect use of their property and also without permissions.
- Licensing – Licensing can refer to copyright in the sense that you need permissions from the creator to use that particular piece of media. However, if you need branding, music or to use a likeness from a real world person or location, you may need a license in order to use it. Without a license to use it, you are in breach of copyright and do not have permission to use it. This can also refer to the use of software used to create forms of media, without a proper license to use the software, you can not publish nor make money from anything created in the software. There are some exceptions such as Unity where you don’t need to pay for the software until you’ve earned so much money from the product.
- GDPR – General Data Protection Regulations refers to the use of collecting and storing a users data. This is a recent thing when it comes to legal and regulatory issues following on from Facebook’s data study by Cambridge Analytica.
- NDA – NDA’s are non-disclosure agreements. These agreements are signed by people who have seen, heard, took part in and or worked on projects that are of top secret or not ready to be released into the world yet. As an example, I signed an NDA for Galaxy FM and their world cup song in 2010 as I helped record and produce the record. The song itself charted, if I had taken the song and uploaded it on my own accord to social media, I could have had several legal teams chasing me for loss of profits and breaking NDA.
Regulations can relate to a lot of things when it comes to video games, you have the regulations for publishing on certain platforms but the main regulation is for publishing a game altogether. For this games need to be certified by boards such as PEGI and ESRB in order to let the audience know what to expect in the game they are buying. For publishers and game designers, this is also good from their point of view as it helps them determine if they are going to reach their initial target audience.
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