게임 소프트웨어의 개발사와 퍼블리셔 간의 지식재산권 문제에 관한 고찰

Abstract

Game software industry is a high-profit field relative to other industries. It has advantages that it can be possible to serve foreign countries by controlling IP(Internet Protocol) addresses of them and can be produced by small capital and human resource, but has disadvantages to be easily copied and distributed by the Internet. In the case that the Game software was succeeded by having entertaining factors and effective marketing, a lot of dispute between the producers and publishers are likely to be occurred about the Intellectual property of the game software at the time of expiration or by conflict of the interest between them. The game software can be protected by patents in case of being satisfied with patentability of the Business Method invention, by copyright for the audio-visual work and source code, by trademark for a title of the game software, and by trade secret for know-how including the source code. Therefore, there has lots of potential risk for the dispute concerning to co-ownership and liability for security of the patent,ownership of the copyright and database, ownership and use of the trademark, and leakage of the trade secret between the producers and the publishers of the game software. In this article, this author intends to discuss the potential problems about the intellectual property between the producers and the publishers, and suggest some recommendations to prevent disputes between them with a view to improve the national competitiveness for the game software industry.