If your business address is the same as your home address, you are a home business owner. So:

What does your policy/agent say? Neither I nor anyone else here have looked at your policy, so how do you expect us to know what you're covered for and what you're paying for?

As I said before, some companies may void your policy if you use your home as something other than a residence; e.g., a home business. That may not always be the case and you would need to look at your current policy to find out. 

A RESPONSIBLE home business owner should get home business coverage in addition to their current plan. That being said I'm sure there are plenty of home business owners who aren't that responsible and don't get that coverage. Not only does this expose you to increased liability and make it harder for you to run your business effectively, but it could put your current coverage at risk.

1. Typically yes, but check with your city/town as far as guidelines and ordinances for home businesses. They vary. Also keep in mind that the information may become public record, so you may want to consider getting a PO Box for your home business to protect your privacy.

2. Yes. Most home business owners are underinsured for this very reason-- typical homeowner insurance policies won't cover much as far as damages and will cover nothing as far as business-related liability, and operating a business out of your home may in some cases void your current homeowner insurance policy (you're using your home in a manner outside the scope of what's stated in your policy). Check your policy and check with your insurer about adding at the very least better contents and general liability coverage.

Bear in mind that a lot of font creators have registered their fonts with the USPTO as design patents, so your hypothetical would not apply to those; this is especially true with regard to commercial fonts. Your scenerio also sounds like it may arguably constitute reverse engineering, which may be in violation of the font file EULA.

Gotta keep an eye on the big picture.  

Hey, it's great having an actual lawyer round here to contribute to stuff like this.

Especially one that just answered this question for a client not terribly long ago. I'm always happy to help and I value the appreciation, so thanks!

I found this interesting blog entry on the issue:

http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=155

Seems the bottom line is that it's a very gray area and it's better just to use free fonts (or make your own fonts) to avoid any legalities.

I know German law has specific IP protections regarding calligraphy and typeface, and I believe a couple other European countries have similar laws. But under U.S. law the only copyrightable subject matter is the computer file itself; technically a screenshot of a letter wouldn't constitute infringement under U.S. law or a violation of the GPL because the GPL only applies to the code/file itself as opposed to the font generated by the image.

 

I can't seem to find much information (in humane form) on licences. I have started a roguelike project in Ruby/Gosu, however I find myself overwhelmed by all those different licences. I have to pick one for Google Code, where I'd dump my project at to be gobbled up by the public. Yes, I mean to open source it.

Any of you licence savvy guys (and gals) care to help this poor bloke out? Perhaps this information would have been useful for others that aspire to share their projects, as well.

P.S.: By the way, if you guys (and gals, of course) know of any alternatives to Google Codes... I'd be willing to consider.

What questions do you have specifically? Are you confused by the terms? Are you not sure what licenses you need? 

If you're talking about an open source license for your own project, I did an FAQ covering some of the more common ones a while back:

http://underdevelopmentlaw.com/open-source-faq-part-i/
http://underdevelopmentlaw.com/open-source-faq-part-ii/

If you don't find the answers you need there let us know what you're looking for.

I can see where it wouldn't be much of a problem if you only spent a couple of weeks on a very basic app. But once you get into the domain of polished, fully operational and genuinely fun games, you're looking at a turnaround of one to six months, sometimes longer. Selling it for $1 at that point is just unrealistic.

Yeah, but that's the thing, most of those apps aren't made in a couple of weeks, I thought.

In any case, the same thing ends of happening that has happened in the Casual Games PC market:

1.  You make a hit game and spend 2 months on it.
2.  Someone else clones your games and adds features to it.  They spend 3 months on it and sell it at the same price (or cheaper).
3.  You create the sequel.  Because of the competition you have to spend 5 months and charge it even cheaper...

And on and on.

At the end of the day, it just seems like a no win situation in terms of a sustainable future (unless you can keep pumping out games)...

The alternative is to make solid (niche) games and sell them at a high price.

Yeah, I was talking more along the lines of simpler apps that have one basic gimmick. Any actual game will take longer.

re: clone wars-- there's a thread right below this one concerning that. And there's an alternative that is in line with what I constantly tell my clients to do: enforce the hell out of your IP. Competition is great, and I'm not saying "be an IP Troll a la Langdell", but that doesn't mean you should just lie down when someone's made a blatant rip-off of your game. If they're only using the same rules, etc. then yeah, it's probably fair play. You don't have much of a case. But if they're basically counterfeiting your product it's a problem.


http://underdevelopmentlaw.com/ip-enforcement-for-independent-game-developers/

Yeah, great article!

Not entering into the iphone market and having no plans to enter it anyways, it always seemed to me that the iphone market was a little broke.

I just never understood how it made sense to sell a game for a dollar.

I can see where it wouldn't be much of a problem if you only spent a couple of weeks on a very basic app. But once you get into the domain of polished, fully operational and genuinely fun games, you're looking at a turnaround of one to six months, sometimes longer. Selling it for $1 at that point is just unrealistic.

Thanks for linking this, it's a good read.

I dunno if anyone linked it in this article, but I just hit on a Gamasutra article about this subject:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=26290

this made me smile. Especially since I wrote it partially in response to this thread...

Coincidentally:http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4207/what_gamers_think_about_.php

Generally I think that this model works pretty well for certain MMO products, but it leaves room for exploiting and I don't see it helping prevent piracy or private servers.

The only thing I can imagine is that this is another delaying tactic. We've seen he's posting job ads trying to hire programmers and buy games. This is prolly an effort to muddy the water enough that he can waste court time, later apologize, then unveil a game his company made in the meantime to try and justify his claims.

I'm really wishing that they'd put this guy away. Seeing somebody behave in such a transparently criminal manner is absolutely infuriating.

Looking forward to hearing him justify the existence of this imaginary board of directors. I don't think ANYONE who knows who Tim is will want to get anywhere near enough to him to act as this board.

-SirNiko

coincidentally this is apparently exactly what he did in the Velocity trial, and why EGI was originally sanctioned.

Something is suspended?  I don't understand what any of this legalese means.  

Basically it means that Langdell filed a motion to dismiss the trademark cancellation, and any filings by EA that aren't a response to the motion to dismiss will be ignored. Langdell's memo in support of his motion to dismiss relies on a prior dispute, where apparently Velocity tried to claim that some of Langdell's marks were registered fraudulently and had been abandoned due to non-use. Langdell alleges that he won that dispute on the merits in the federal court of Virginia and Velocity and EGI settled.

It's worth noting that two of the marks EA's trying to cancel, "Edge" and "Cutting Edge", weren't part of the original Velocity dispute, and thus may be excluded from what may amount to collateral estoppel-- this is a legal procedure where an issue may be estopped (prevented)from being relitigated if it has been litigated in a prior matter and at least one party from the prior dispute is in the current dispute. There are some other requirements, which you can read in the brief if you're bored.

I don't really know what all was litigated in the Velocity dispute, but I may look it up if I get some free time later.

edit:
Everything on Pacer suggests that the final dismissal of the case, including the with prejudice judgment, was probably the result of the settlement-- otherwise I have no idea what kind of evidence Langdell was able to pull out of his ass, since the entire dispute revolved around trademarks associated with computer hardware. The Court originally sanctioned Edge for intentionally misleading the Court, but withdrew the sanctions in the final judgment. Find a copy of THAT entertaining opinion here:

http://underdevelopmentlaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/velocity-v-edge-sanctions-ruling.pdf

The Longest Journey and its sequel had some pretty amazing writing.

Well, to quote my blog on that game's story:

To be honest, I thought it was only okay. It's really grand and sweeping, but the characters seem somewhat inconsistant. The world and lore around it are really neat, and the attention to detail was great. Also, it has a really satisfying ending, though I was surprised that a few things weren't tied off.

So... yeah. I wouldn't even come close to saying "amazing". There are much, much better adventure game stories.

If I were referring exclusively to the story I would agree with you. There are some fantastic games in the JRPG genre alone that have deep, well developed, and emotionally moving stories. But I wasn't referring to the story alone. I thought the dialog was particularly well done, the story moved at a consistent and not-too-drawn-out pace, and as you said the attention to detail was pretty decent. Someone mentioned earlier that there's the writing of the story (e.g. what the game's about) and the writing within the game. I think I was thinking more about the writing within the game.

The Longest Journey and its sequel had some pretty amazing writing. The voice work in Dreamfall was meh, but the screenplay, story, and script were all very well done.

I completely disagree. Don't hire a writer, get out there and start writing for yourself. Games don't need people who write novels or screenplays to write their stories, they need the people who make games. There are fundamental differences between literature and games, and I think when you hire a writer to write a game you'll end up with a story that doesn't fit into an interactive medium.

I'm not against this approach, but don't assume that there are no writers who exist with a strong interest in video games or that narrative, pacing, plot and other elements of writing are so simple that you couldn't benefit from the input from someone who commits much of his time studying and practicing it.

Of course, I didn't want to give the impression that we should at all ignore literature or writers (in fact, I believe the exact opposite), but I really don't like the approach to game making that puts people into tiny little slots. ie: you are Writer, I am Programmer, she is Artist. That's a whole different topic though.

But thanks for point that out. Writing is such an encompassing process... to say there is no benefit at all in writers is ridiculous.

Wait why are you against typecasting people based on their qualifications and skill level? Would you hire me to write your code? It's all well and good to wear multiple hats if you and three of your buddies are creating a game that emphasizes game play and mechanics, but when you have the means to hire talent, do so. It's called talent for that reason. The people are "talented" in areas where you are mediocre at best and horribad at worst. In fact I think a lot of bad writing and the "justified" excuse for bad writing in games came from the DIY "I can write a good story!" approach. Hire a professional screenwriter for chrissakes.

Look at "smaller" games like Braid and Axel & Pixel. You think the designers/programmers did their artwork? The artists chosen for those products have a wealth of experience and developed style to work with. The same is true for writing (not saying those games had great writing; they didn't. Just juxtapositioning the obvious artwork component)-- it takes years for a screenwriter in particular to develop the kind of voice, tone, and flow necessary to make dialog and story function without sounding utterly idiotic.

Renaissance people are kind of a rare commodity. I don't think it's in the best interest of any commercial creative endeavor to assume that you or anyone else on your team is the Leonardo De Vinci of video games. 

Hey everyone! 
I've been lurking on these forums for quite long already but now that I have a game nearing completion, I decided to register. 


About me... I like video games quite lot like one might guess and also enjoy making them(not that I have released anything yet...).
I've also taken up digital painting recently. Here's my first picture to fill up the post.


My best regards to all of you.

I'll be surprised if I'm the first to say this, but... WTF. That's the most disturbing artistic rendering of Mario and Luigi I've ever seen. What exactly are you trying to say there?

Hey, kids earn a lot of cash these days! 

Some of them do. They really, really do.

I wound up writing on this at under development since it's peripherally related to a case I'm working on. Unfortunately the site's kind of being goofy right now because I just moved it off of typepad. But if you're curious: http://underdevelopmentlaw.com/

I believe saying his name three times in a row while looking in a mirror will also do that...

Bloody Timmy, Bloody Timmy, Bloody Timmy... 

Just ask good old Dr. Langdell!

I kind of worry that asking Langdell anything will expose me to litigation, threat of litigation, and a demand for damages. So cheers, but I'll refrain. 

The reality is, if you use someone's IP they might ask you to stop. Sometimes you can guess whether they will or not, but it's never 100% either way.

If you are making no money they will basically never ask you to do anything other than stop distributing what you have made.

Oh they'll ASK for more-- any copyright/IP/in-house attorney or paralegal who has ever drafted a C&D will demand either statutory damages or actual damages based on an accounting of copies distributed. And if you have a day job they will sometimes put pressure on you to get that money, or submit it to a pet firm that specializes in collections. Never assume that companies will ignore the fact that copyright and IP law lets you squeeze people like a sponge for the slightest violation.

This is, incidentally, something indie developers should keep in mind as well if they see obvious rip-offs of their game on the 'net. If you're a smaller dev and don't have the cash flow for an attorney's hourly rate they may be willing to take it on contingency.