Every day, more and more people are becoming aware of intellectual property. As a software developer, this is great!

When I started my career, I routinely ran into people who couldn't understand how someone could justify $100 for a piece of software when it only "cost" $5 to produce it because they didn't understand the concept of intellectual property.

Unfortunately, enough people know just enough to get themselves into trouble.  So in this article I will try to walk lay people through two of the three major types of intellectual property (the third being patents). 

Note, I am not a lawyer.  This article is not providing legal advice and if you have specific legal conclusions you want researched, you should speak to a qualified intellectual property lawyer. 

What is "IP"?

IP can refer to trademarks, copyrights, patents and other forms of intellectual property.  A trademark is IP.  A copyright is IP.  A  patent is IP.

Copyrights

Copyrights protect original works of authorship from being copied.  It's pretty straight forward.  Original. Works. Of Authorship.  Is that that thing a copy of that other thing?

Songs, poetry, movies, computer software and even architecture are protected by copyright.   Copyright does not protect names, facts, ideas, systems, recipes or methods of operation.

A copyright comes into existence the moment you create something that could potentially be protected. You don't have to file something to have a copyright.

You can't copyright an idea. You can copyright an expression.

Here's a simple example:

You can't copyright a cake recipe.  If I make a cake following a recipe and you make a cake following the same recipe these are two different cakes because they are both unique expressions of that recipe.  On the other hand, if we had a machine that could duplicate your cake then those cakes would be copies.

At the end of the day, a juror is ultimately asked "is this a copy of that?"  That means thing A and thing B are put next to each other and if thing B is substantially similar, then it's a copy.  Substantially similar doesn't mean just "similar".  It means that one is pretty obviously a copy of the other.

More reading:

https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ33.pdf 

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/187385/clone_wars_the_five_most_.php 

A good rule of thumb to follow on whether something is copyright infringement is to simply ask yourself: Is this a copy of this other thing?  Not similar. Not inspired by. Copied.

Famous Copyright Lawsuits

The question usually asked of jurors: Would a typical person recognize A and being B?

Sims Social vs. The Ville (EA vs. Zynga)

Rogers vs. Koons (Photography)

Star Wars vs. Battlestar Galactica (Too similar?)

My take

• The Sims Social vs. The Ville are too close to call for me.
• Rogers vs. Koons was pretty obvious copyright infringement to me
• Fox would have lost the case handedly, BSG isn't a copy of Star Wars.

Trademarks

A trademark is a word and/or symbol to identify goods and services from one seller from another to prevent consumer confusion over the source of those goods and services.

Trademarks exist protect consumers and to contain the good will and reputation of the seller of goods and services.  "X: The name you trust!"

If the question is whether something is associated with something else or if people will "believe" something is actually something else, you are in the land of trademarks.

More reading:

https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/documents/BasicFacts.pdf

Famous cases

Adidas vs. Forever 21 (the case of confusing shirts)

Starbucks vs. Freddoccino (the case of stealing good will)

Superhero (Marvel and DC have trademarked the word Superhero)

My take

It's pretty rare for a trademark case (within the US) to involve someone actually using someone else's trademark to associate their new product and service with it...so most cases involve third parties trying to pawn off on what they believe is the good will and reputation of their mark.

• In both the Starbucks and Adidas cases, the argument seemed to be that people associate the stripes or the name+design of the drink with their mark and thus are benefiting from the good will and reputation of the former.
• Superhero is way above my head. No idea.

Conclusions

On the Internet, everyone thinks they're a lawyer.  And sometimes, even general practice lawyers will opine on IP without really knowing much on it. 

I'm obviously not a lawyer but I have been through millions of dollars of IP litigation over the past 20 (mostly those patent trolls you hear about but multiple trademark and copyright suits as well).  

The very first IP lawsuit I was involved in was with Entrepreneur Magazine.  We had a video game called Entrepreneur and they argued that people would be likely confused into thinking our game was related to their magazine.  We settled and hence The Corporate Machine was born.  Would we have won if we had gone to court? Even today, I have no idea. You tell me.  It wasn't worth spending millions of dollars on though.

Anyone who tries to tell you they know the outcome is only showing they have no idea what they're talking about.  A better analogy would be to think of it as weighted dice.  When you're dealing with the courts, you are dealing with human beings and while different cases have better odds of success (No, you can't call your OS "Lindows") or failure ("No, Battlestar Galactica is not a copy of Star Wars") there's no sure thing.

Which is why a layperson's guide like this will get you 75% of the way because the last 25% of the way is largely dice rolling:

Copyright: Is X a copy of Y? Put them next to each other or describe in detail the two or list the source code of both, are they substantially similar? (i.e. a copy?)

Trademark: Would the average person familiar with the subject matter be likely confused into believing that X and Y are connected?

In the age of procedurally generated maps and universes, saying you have thousands of planets in your game no longer carries the same punch.  Stardock's upcoming space RPG, Star Control: Origins indeed boasts thousands of worlds but what Stardock is hoping players to notice is how different different worlds are.

The Realism battle

Early in the game's development it was decided that fun would always outrank realism when it came to planets. While the home solar system of the human race is fairly well known, who is to say that there aren't Topaz planets out there? (scientists, that's who!)

Dreaming of an alien dawn

The first question Stardock designers asked themselves was, what should the surface of a planet look like? How do you make traveling to thousands of worlds interesting and not repetitive? The answer was largely to throw out any thought of "realism" and come up with as many exotic world types as possible.

The next question they asked was what should they look like from above?

Beauty vs. Fun

Making a planet exotic looking is one thing. The question then becomes, how do you make sure it's fun to explore them?

For example, cliffs and mountains are all fun until the player gets stuck.

Procedurally generation:

A habitable planet:

a plain boring sphere.

From this sphere a planet class is given a list of variables to work with.  What types of materials will be on it? What types of geographical features might be on it? What types of minerals, life forms, etc. might be on it?

The engine then looks at how far away from the sun it is, how big the planet is, how big the star is, etc. and fills out the planet.

Final Procedurally generated planet:

But this isn't the end of the story.  As cool as this planet looks, and it is unique, it is, as a practical matter, basically the same as another planet of the same class with similar stats:

These two planets are different but it's a difference without meaning.  So if a planet has significance to the story, it will often get an additional pass by a designer:

and then buildings placed in just the right spot:

Now the writer can say "Seek the temple located in the glaciers of Palon III. There you will find the answers you seek."

This also makes the entire process much more accessible.  As wonderful as procedural generation is as a time-savings tool, it greatly reduces the number of people who can collaborate on the creative side.  By contrast, if the creation tools are made not just easy but fun to use, it opens things up for many talented people to bring their own imaginations into play.

Thus when the player lands on the planet and begins to seek out the ruins, they know that that planet is unique even though it is the result of procedural generation and human intervention.

It seems like every game now wants to brag about having a procedurally generated world, galaxy or universe as if this is a selling point.  Procedural generation has become the game industry's equivalent of CGI where what started out as a useful tool in the hand of designers has become increasingly used as a replacement for design.

Stardock's upcoming space RPG, Star Control: Origins has plenty of procedurally generated worlds.  With thousands of planets to explore, there's no way to hand-craft every single one.  But procedural generation in the game exists to serve the story and writers.  Because when it comes to the story and the adventures and the quests, each one is hand-crafted by professional Science Fiction writers.

Part 1: A living universe that is also hand-crafted

Step 1: Use a real star map. 

We humans know what stars are near by and what they are called.  For stars that are further away and start having number designations, Stardock gave them colorful names for players to remember.  Other than certain exoplanets, we don't really know what's around them.

Step 2: Deciding how solar systems should be depicted

Stardock has to decide early on how realistic to make its solar systems for Star Control.  The classic Star Control series was limited to single stars with limited numbers of planets and moons.  Star Control: Origins, supports binary star systems, brown dwarfs and no practical limit on the number of planets in a system.  Thus, the question really came down to game-play.  What was fun?

Step 3: Procedurally generate the solar systems.

The Star Control team then took from their Galactic Civilizations experience and built an app that would generate the planets around the stars using lots of different rules for gameplay.  Red stars tended to have more of certain classes of planets while blue stars have a different set of rules. 

A procedurally generated star would do a fine job creating a decent, if otherwise unremarkable solar system.  This is when the writers get involved.

Step 3: Coming up with a story

While the main story-arc of Star Control: Origins is handled by the lead writer at Stardock, the rest of the map is divided up and handed out to writers who begin crafting their own stories.

So for example, in this solar system, there are two advanced and competing civilizations who are fighting over a planet to colonize in that system.  They don't have fast-than-light travel so the entire drama takes place in just this one star system.

Step 4: The writer modifies the solar system

Right from in-game, the writer can bring up the Stellar Cartography tools and begin editing the solar system.

Now the writer can make this solar system have its own story.

The end result is a solar system with 3 stars in it.  The main primary star and two dwarf stars.  The purpose here is to set up the conflict.  There are now four habitable planets and a "Jewel" class planet (rich).  The two inner habitable planets are our conflicting planets and the other planets are the ones they're competing with. 

Step 5: The Story

In Star Control, every story is hand-crafted.

When Stardock is asked why they went this path, their answer is that the problem with randomly generated quests and missions is that they assume players are playing the game to simply "get stuff" and the story and the lore is just filler.  But Stardock believes that the story is the reward and that look exists to allow players to access new stories.

However, making it easy for writers to create stories involved a great deal of effort.  For example, Stardock's business software unit was employed to develop "Adventure Studio" whose task was to allow science fiction writers to be able to craft stories with a minimum of effort that could also take advantage of Stardock's powerful scripting abilities.  This way, different authors could write their own stories that others could pick up on since any author can create a "variable" on the fly and those variables become accessible to every other author to make use of allowing them to tie together stories in unexpected ways.

Procedural Generation is a tool, not a goal

Procedural generation helped cut down the grunt work in developing the Star Control: Origins universe.  But it wasn't intended to substitute for story-telling.  Exploration is a means to an end, not the ends unto itself.  Every crashed ship, every enemy pirate every refugee and every hero you encounter was placed there as part of an intertwined story.  Procedural generation ensured that the writers had time to focus on their stories. The technology is designed to serve the writers not the other way around.

Next up: Thousands of unique planets

(every planet is procedurally generated to start with but the writers can then flesh out planets for story-telling purposes)

For most people, Star Control: Origins will be the first Star Control game they've ever heard of.  But long ago, back in the DOS days, there was a trilogy of Star Control games.

The first Star Control game was essentially a Space Wars style game with a strategy layer. There wasn't really any "lore" with it.  The second one, my favorite, was Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters. This game was filled with an epic lore that dated back over a quarter million years. The third one, Star Control III: The Kesari Quadrant, took its own direction, which many fans have since come to not care for.

When we began working on Star Control: Origins we had the challenge of deciding what was and wasn't canon in the Star Control universe.  Ultimately, what we decided was to make Star Control a multiverse.  Thus, Star Control II took place in what we call the Ur-Quan universe.  Star Control III takes place in the Kessari universe, and Origins takes place in the Origins universe.

Early concept of the Xraki

Continue Reading...

Star Control: Origins is a space action adventure game.  You are the Captain of a ship with a mission to protect Earth and explore the galaxy. 

From a technical perspective, Star Control is a story engine.  We don't generate new quests.  Instead, we are looking to populate a deep and rich world with hand-crafted Sci-Fi stories.  But we won't be doing it alone.  Much of our effort has been to create consumer (i.e. user friendly) apps like Adventure Studio, the City Crafter, and the Ship Designer, so that people can create compelling stories to share.

Of course, our job is to tell the first story: Star Control: Origins itself, starting in 2088. Over the past four years, we've written a lot of stories.  And while the main mission might "only" take 20 hours to complete, that is not the end of the story.  It's a big galaxy out there.  And mind you, this is just our universe.  People will be able to travel to completely different universes as well with their own stories and characters.  But it is also our hope that fans will want to help flesh out this universe with us over the coming years.

To understand how big our playing field is, let's talk about our setting: Orion's Spur.

Continue Reading...

With Star Control: Origins now less than 60 days from release I thought I’d spend a few minutes writing up a status report on some of the murky legal issues between us and the designers of Star Control II.

As many of you know, Stardock acquired the Star Control IP from Atari in 2013. This acquisition didn’t include all of the copyrights to the second game in the DOS trilogy. Notably, it didn’t include the art, source code or music.

Stardock was able to team up with Riku and Dan, the two primary composers of the SC2 music but until recently, we were led to believe that the art copyrights were held by the two designers (Paul Reiche and Fred Ford). We recently discovered that that wasn’t the case as it turns out SC2 was a collaboration in which each member continued to own what they created. I.e. the others weren’t employees or contractors.

For us, this only makes it clearer that we shouldn’t try to touch the SC2 game copyrights with a 10 foot pole. At one time, we had hoped to license those copyrights to have the classic ships in Fleet Battles and to depict the Orz as they were in SC2 for a cameo.  Unfortunately, this would be impossible.

For example, the Orz was created by multiple people who we now have learned each maintained possible copyrights for their individual contributions. Like I said, Not even with a 10 foot pole.

That doesn’t mean the Star Control aliens won’t be in Star Control games. That just means we can’t rely on how they were expressed in Star Control 2 because those expressions are owned by...well..someone.

This is also why there hasn’t been a Master of Magic II btw. No one knows who owns what. At least with Star Control we own the trademarks and have rights to the music and own the overall franchise. Plus we own Star Control 3 which, despite its foibles is a superset of the aliens in Star Control 2 (other than the  copyrightable elements that Paul Reiche personally owned at the time which, might now be limited to certain aspects of the UQM universe lore). Nevertheless, it’s all too messy for us to feel safe touching.

I realize some of you are disappointed at how things have progressed with regards to Paul and Fred. Most of you are aware that Stardock did not originally plan to include the classic Star Control aliens in Origins.

Unfortunately, after Paul and Fred chose to try to cancel the Star Control trademark while simultaneously sewing confusion as to authenticity of Star Control: Origins, Stardock had no choice but to lock down its IP. Since Stardock owns the Star Control related trademarks, the lawyers recommended perfecting those trademarks by registering them.

In addition, you can’t just trademark something, you have to use it in commerce. Regardless of whether the classic aliens were used in commerce sufficiently before to establish trademark rights, the classic games are no longer for sale and we currently have no plans to return the classic games for sale even if the dispute is resolved.

Therefore, we have begun releasing the soundtrack to Star Control: Origins with featured DLCs for each alien with the original music as well as with remastered music by the original composers. This gives players a taste of the amazing work that Riku, Mason and Dan have done.

Each DLC also includes artwork and lore which we hope will persuade fans and Paul and Fred that we are not interested in expressing the Star Control aliens in future Star Control games they way they were in SC2. They don’t just look different, they have a different characterization and lore (SCO takes place in a different universe).

Some fans undoubtedly would prefer we copy the SC2 aliens. Unfortunately, even if we could, we wouldn’t (other than the ships, I do miss the classic ships but alas those are in limbo). The alien lore and stories were designed to essentially climax with sc2: the Ur-quan masters. By contrast, SCO is being designed with a long term story arc in mind. This will become more obvious in the months to come.

Just as the authors in SC2 (and later SC3) had their take on the Star Control aliens, so do the writers and artists working on SCO. The talented writers and artists at Stardock are not interested in “copying” what was done before. The needs of the story and lore determine what aliens are in and how they are depicted.

Could Stardock have called the Vorlon-like alien species that projects itself into our facet looking like what they think we expect aliens to look like something else? Sure. But since it is now forced to do everything it can to protect its trademark rights in Star Control they will be the New Arilou. This helps Stardock defend itself from a party that seeks to cancel the IP that it paid hundreds of thousands to acquire and followed it up by investing millions more into over four years. It also allows fans to see how the Arilou in the Origins universe develop. 

While it’s very unlikely that the SC2 Arilou was anywhere near developed enough to be protected as its own character, Stardock has taken great pains to ensure that it’s Arilou expression is not a derivative even of the behavior. This is something critics here already have observed in that we are taking the Star Control aliens different direction given the story arcs planned for SCO. 

Incidentally, as long time GalCiv fans know, the gc aliens went through the same process when we moved from OS/2 to Windows. Those changes were even more dramatic owing to much more dramatic changes to the background lore (mostly regarding the Altarians needing to look like humans and thus the old Altarian design got rebranded as Torians).

Similarly, which Star Control aliens show up and when will be determined by the needs of the story and lore.

In the meantime, we look to feature remasters of the classic alien music along with the originals provided by and often remastered by the original composers. 

More:

https://www.stardock.com/games/starcontrol/store

Cheers!

Making alien worlds is very fun.

But how realistic do they need to be for players to have fun? In Star Control, we've opted for cool over realistic since, in all likelyhood, most planets are either just big rocks, big ice balls, or balls of gas.  So having worlds made out of diamonds and rubies and gold and iron and other weird things allows players to constantly discover new things to explore.

Greetings!

I am pleased to give you a head's up that for those who have pre-ordered Star Control: Origins that we will be including a host of additional DLC as part of that purchase.

https://www.stardock.com/games/starcontrol/store 

As some of you know, Riku Nuottajavi and Dan Nicholson, the two primary composers from Star Control II, have signed on with us to bring the Star Control II music to Star Control: Origins.  With the help of our long-time collaborator, Mason Fischer, we have begun to remaster, remix and in some cases completely recreate the classic songs with today's audio fidelity.

We are also going to be including some of our favorite tunes originating with the new Star Control aliens debuting in Star Control: Origins.

As some of you know, the Chenjesu didn't appear directly in Star Control II so they received a brand-new theme just for this DLC.   In the case of the Arilou, Dan Nicholson did the original in Star Control II and Riku has composed a new mix of it here.

Star Control: Origins is still at a pre-order price of $31.49 (it'll be $39.99 at release).

It's quite a challenge to find that right mixture between what is realistic versus what is fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/55_Cancri

We have 55 Cancri in the game and it has the exopolanet that NASA discovered.  Of course, we can only speculate what that planet is and we do have a red dwarf in that star system as well.

One of the more interesting things players will discover is that many (if not most) star systems actually have multiple stars in them.  Our solar system is somewhat unusual in that respect.

My question to you is, how realistic does the game need to be for you to have fun? 

I have watched this so many times.

With our work on Star Control: Origins, we now have an engine that really could create a truly sophisticated battle system like this.  I wouldn't want to do this for Star Control since the charm of its battles is that they are fast and and simple.

But I bet I'm not the only person who would like to see a modern game that takes all the various systems into account.  There are some interesting ones I've seen that remind me of FTL but I'd want something that is presented more like this.