Let’s talk about the issues of plagiarism and rights protection in mobile games

Recently, Shanda Games announced that it will focus on rights protection relief for imitation Legend mobile games on the market. Currently, about 200 copies have been issued at one time. The official rights protection letter involves about 20 defendant companies such as Apple, Baidu, UC Jiuyu, Wandoujia, and Synchronous Tui. The initial claims totaled 50 million yuan.

Many people may be surprised that there are so many infringing parties and the amount of compensation is so high. However, from the perspective of copyright owners, the most troublesome question is: How can infringement be so easy? Let me talk about the current difficult issues of rights protection in mobile games.

First of all, it is difficult to innovate and easy to copy.

In mobile game works, it is very difficult to innovate in game character design, game content, game operations and game effects. However, once a new innovative form appears, it is very easy to copy.

For example, after "Tiantian Love Elimination" became popular, overnight, mobile phone players will see various newly launched elimination games in major application markets, and the objects to be eliminated may change from balls to rhombuses. , the color changed from green to red.

At this time, you will find that the competition in the mobile game market is not about originality, but optimization ability. Whoever has strong optimization ability and strong promotion ability can quickly occupy the market. market and earn considerable income. However, if the original creator has insufficient ability or insufficient investment in promotion and operation, he will soon be "buried".

The reason why copying is easy or easy to copy lies in the properties of the work. As we all know, regardless of text form, character modeling, or visual effects, as long as you have a model or reference and find a few designers to "imitate" other people's works, you can easily "plagiarize" or "plagiarize" other people's works.

What is even more troublesome for copyright owners is that the easy-to-copy attribute of mobile game works cannot be changed or reversed because mobile games must be visual. As long as it is visible, imitation can be achieved.

Secondly, it is easy to identify infringement but difficult to identify it.

In the mobile game industry, after a new game becomes popular, similar games will spring up like mushrooms after a rain. From the perspective of "plagiarists", this is a category of personalized games. For example, after "Escape from the Temple" became popular, it quickly spawned a new type of game? Parkour games. A large number of parkour games in the form of running and controlled by gravity sensors are on the market. If the characters and scenes change slightly, it is already difficult to determine that it constitutes infringement. If the game name, characters, and scenes change significantly, it will be even more difficult. It is difficult to determine that it constitutes infringement.

This actually raises another idea for the protection of works, that is, in addition to protecting the copyright of works, whether it is necessary to simultaneously consider whether the original content, design or operation must be protected by patents or technical secrets, etc. How to protect it?

Of course, there is another issue involved. Will expanding the scope of protection restrict the development of the industry? And this is precisely the banner that infringers are most willing to hold high.

Thirdly, there is a lot of plagiarism and it is difficult to compensate.

As mentioned above, it is easy to copy and infringe mobile game works, but it is difficult to identify infringement, which is equivalent to providing good protection to plagiarists. Therefore, there are many plagiarists.

But when copyright owners claim their rights, they will find another problem, that is, "there is too much plagiarism and it is difficult to compensate." There are many reasons why it is difficult to compensate. Some of them are because they did not make any money and have no money to compensate, and some are because they have transferred their property and have no money to compensate.

But in the final analysis, it may be that the copyright owner has spent a long time safeguarding his rights, only to find that the costs of safeguarding his rights are far greater than the benefits. This poses another difficult problem for copyright owners: should they sit back and watch the plagiarists revel and tolerate it, or should they spend huge sums of money to defend their rights and suffer losses.

When you become a copyright holder, this issue is really difficult to handle. On the one hand, market opportunities are fleeting; on the other hand, others can make a lot of money without any effort.

To change the current dilemma of difficulty in safeguarding mobile game rights, copyright owners may need to change their protection ideas, rights protection methods and paths.

First, change single protection to combined protection.

Currently, most mobile game works focus on copyright protection. Subsequently newly created mobile game works should simultaneously consider the introduction of comprehensive protection strategies such as patents and trademarks while protecting copyright.

For example, from the game name, game character modeling, game content and even game controls, etc., we will strengthen the application and protection of intellectual property rights from different dimensions according to the characteristics of the game.

The advantage of doing this is that it can overcome the problems of difficulty in identifying copyright infringement in mobile games and the limited scope of protection. In addition, the means of combating infringing works can also become more diverse.

Secondly, change single-point rights protection to batch rights protection.

Take Shanda Games’ rights protection method as an example. It issued 200 official rights protection letters in batches at one time to dozens of manufacturers in various aspects such as game developers and application markets. The benefits of this approach are also obvious. Compared with point-to-point rights protection, it can effectively deter relevant interest chains and is expected to curb the spread or sale of infringing works as quickly as possible, in order to minimize infringement losses as quickly as possible. .

Mobile game works, as a kind of commodity, will be affected by the market life cycle. If a game cannot continue to make money, then for mobile game developers, it will have to invest huge costs to maintain the old game. Operations still require huge costs to develop new games.

Therefore, unlike other works, the copyright protection of mobile game works urgently requires "marketization of means" and "monetization of results" to curb infringement and expand revenue sources through litigation and rights protection. ;