Beyond Games: Strategically Crafting Your Intellectual Properties (Part I)
I recently had the pleasure of being a guest professor (game design) and lecturer at Champlain College in Burlington Vermont. Champlain’s Electronic Game and Interactive Development and BYOBiz programs are impressive, and I’m excited to follow the growth of their new Emergent Media Center.
I promised to post the slides from my talk Beyond Games: Strategically Crafting Your Intellectual Properties, but unless you attended the Powerpoint is not much more than an appetizer without the subsequent courses. So in the spirit of nourishing clients, colleagues, students, and anyone else who happens to read our B-Log, this multi-part series will fill out the plate, starting with the basics.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY 101
According to the United States Patent & Trademark Office, the term Intellectual Property means:
Creations of the mind; creative works or ideas embodied in a form that can be shared or can enable others to recreate, emulate, or manufacture them. There are four** ways to protect intellectual property - patents, trademarks, copyrights or trade secrets.
** Actually there are more than four ways to protect intellectual property. See the bottom of this post for details.
To illustrate how an idea becomes an intellectual property, let’s say you have a brilliant idea.
Your idea is to invent a new light bulb that will use up to 80% less electricity than a regular incandescent bulb. People who want to reduce energy costs will love this new light bulb.
And since a reduction in energy usage equals a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, people who want a green lifestyle will also love this new light bulb.
What a brilliant idea! But until you do the work to create a tangible expression of your idea…
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
Something written, visual, digital or physical like a diagram, prototype, or perhaps a working product…
It’s nothing more than a brilliant idea. In other words…
IDEA + TANGIBLE EXPRESSION = INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
CREATIVE COMMONS is a non-profit that offers another form of intellectual property protection, an alternative to full copyright, by providing free tools that let authors, scientists, artists and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from “All Rights Reserved” to “Some Rights Reserved.”
The text of this post uses a Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share Alike license. The images (a key element of the message) were purchased at a very reasonable cost from istockphoto.com with their standard license. Feel free to link to or reference this post, but if you want to copy, syndicate, or redistribute the full post please purchase image rights.
Check back for Part II of Beyond Games: Strategically Crafting Your Intellectual Properties.
