Is it legal to publish a game that already exists but it was 100% developed by me

Question

I am a lover of classic games and I've developed some classical games such as:

• Connect 4
• Monopoly
• Trivial
• Battleship

My main question is what will happen if I publish any of these applications in the existing app stores such as Play Store or App Store for Android/iOS.

Can I create my own games and publish them? Or I will encounter legal problems because these games have been around for years and are protected by the creators.

Should I use an exclusive design or can I rely on the designs of the original games?

Nowadays, I can see most of these games are published by different developers than the original creator of the game.

Answer 1

It depends on the game and what you copy.

Games are an utter nightmare when it comes to IP law as so many parts of them cannot be copyrighted. Game rules for example cannot be copyrighted, nor can the concept itself.

Some things can be copyrighted or trademarked. You cannot use the following:

• Names
• Written elements- while the rules themselves can't be copyrighted, rulebooks can
• Artwork and other visual elements
• Miniatures designed for the game
• Original characters

Try to avoid these and the Hasbro lawyers should leave you alone.

Answer 2

Each game has a different profile of intellectual property including copyrights on text and images and trademarks. Some games may even have patent protection.

Answer 3

There are various possible protected elements in such games. Graphic images and the written text of rules may be protected by copyright, unless they are old enough that the copyright has expired, or the images are too simple to be protected.

If a sufficiently different set of images and text are used, copyright will not apply. The ideas of the game rule, and the game mechanics, are not protected by copyright, but the specific words describing those mechanics may be. A new set of rules would nee to be different enough not to be considered a derivative work to be free of copyright issues.Just how different that must be depends on the specific facts. When there is only one way of naturally expressing an idea, or only a small number of such ways, one of those may be used without a copyright violation.

The name of a game is often protected as a trademark. Unlike copyrights, trademarks do not expire as long as they are still in active use. To be free odf trademark protection, a new name would need to be sufficiently different that reasonable people would not be decieved into tthinking that it was associated with, or sponsored or endoirsed by, teh trademark owners ofd the origina. A prominent disclaimer can help avoid such confusion.

The "trade dress" of a product can also be protected under trademark law. This includes the distinctive colors and apparent of the package, and the styling of a name, such as a unique combination of font and colors. The cursive form of 'coca-cola" is an example of trade dress. The appearance of a game board or of game elements such as cards may also be trade dress, if it is distinctive. A new version would need to avoid similar trade dress to be free of trademark protection.

In some cases game design may be subject to patent protection. But patents expire in a much shorter tiem frame than copyrights do, on the order of 20 years. Games much older than that will not have active patent protections.

A new version of an old game that uses a wholly different name, a completely different logo and appearance, and rules written in significantly different terms will probably not be subject to any v valid IP claims, although a publisher might make such claims.

Answer 4

What happens? You get sued

These games are the intellectual property (both trademark and copyright) of their owners.

Now, what precisely is protected varies and the Scrabulous suit was settled after changes were made and (possibly) money changed hands.

Many of these games have elements that are old enough to be public domain and the rules themselves have no protection but in their commercial forms (their “trade dress”) and particularly their names have IP protection.