“Pwnership”: Is copyright appropriately equipped to handle videogames? : An evaluation of the European legal framework for the protection of creative works in video-games.

Given the huge economic importance of the intellectual labour which these games represent, one might expect the question of what “ownership” means for video-games in the context of IP law to be relatively straightforward. Certainly, this would seem to be the case for other forms of intangible forms of entertainment - as with a book, a film, or a piece of music. Not so with video-games, however. Rather, the protection of the various constituent elements of a video-game in Europe are scattered across a variety of disparate legal provisions at both the national and Community level. For instance, you might seek copyright protection for your game’s sound clips and creative coding under your national copyright act – which must itself[1] be compliant with the European Union’s InfoSoc and Software Directives[2] - whilst simultaneously seeking protection for the inventive way your servers process user data to improve input latency under the European Patent Convention[3]. The fractured nature of this system creates a potential to perturb the careful balance needed between creator and consumer interests. This creates an opportunity for both over- and under-protection which this thesis will seek to evaluate