I've searched the forums far and wide, but I can't find anything solid about:
- General copyright laws.
- Copyrighting a game/game concept/related articles (Characters, websites, dev team name, ect).
- The differnce between trademarking something and copyrighting it.
- How copyright laws work with multiple countries (Ie, do I have to copyright my game in USA, Australia, Japan, ect, or will my game be copyrighted in all automatically?)
- What can/can't be copyrighted.
- What it takes to breach copyright laws?
Can anyone point me too some sites where I can find some solid facts. It's extremely hard to filter a search on this subject, since at the BYOND forum's it is debated too often, and on the general internet the keywords used by millions of websites.
...BYONDscape really needs an article on this stuff...
The best way to find solid information is to get in touch with the government and ask. Most government bodies offer free information services these days.
The gist of copyright is that anything you make is your exclusive protected property -- even without displaying an "All Rights Reserved" warning or a "©" symbol -- and that unless you explicitly state that the intellectual material you have created is in the public domain, any attempt to duplicate your intellectual material constitutes an act of theft.
Copyright is automatic -- there is no procedure to go through. You retain all rights to anything you have created, and you do not have to defend those rights for them to remain legally binding. They remain legally binding in the United States and in Canada until 75 years after your death, though it may vary in other nations.
A trademark is a claim on a name, phrase, title, or expression that is used for your project. Unlike copyrights, trademarks do lose legal status if you do not defend them.
The act of trademarking something is based much on the honour system. Simply adding the classic "TM" (or "MC" in French) is enough to stake a claim on your trademark. To make the claim on your trademark legally binding, you can go to any patent office, pay a fee, and register your trademark, which gives you a complete and solid foundation to keep that trademark. Since you are the registered owner of that trademark, that means that no one else has any grounds to claim that trademark. After registration, you can then use the registered trademark symbol "®" to establish to everyone nearby that you hold a solid trademark over that name, title, phrase, or expression.
However, even without trademarking (registered or not) a title, you can still claim infringement if someone creates something which is similar to yours and uses the same name. If it is nothing similar, however, then it is passed off as coincidence.
All technologically-oriented nations generally honour the copyright laws of another -- if one person in, say, France claimed copyright over something, and someone in the United States ripped it off, the U.S. Department of State would generally issue a cease and desist order to the ripper to prevent an international incident. (Though the U.S. probably wouldn't give a rat's tail these days...)
Any non-tangible material that is your sole invention can be copyrighted; tangible materials must be patented, and words must be trademarked.
Anything that does not qualify as "fair use" -- the chief example of fair use being "posting an excerpt for sake of criticism" -- is a breach of copyright.
I can't remember where, but there was a post on this forum with a link to a U.S. Gov't website which had solid information on copyright laws.