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Purpose of this page: How much of a game may I copy?

Terrence Breitsameter, one of our students, writes:

One of my club members I trade games with works at Nintendo of America (which is where I get my prototype and demo cartridges) was nice enough to ask someone in the legal department, here is his response:

"Parody is OK in almost all cases. Using trademarked characters (like Mario or the actual name of an NGage game) is always a no-go. Aside from that, copyright violation is a bit of a gray area: A judge will examine 4 areas, including how extensively a work is used, the potential of the derivative work to harm the profit-making ability of the original, and the reason for the new work (i.e., teaching or for-profit?).

"Unless you want to study the field in-depth, though, it's best to go with a general rule: If you have to ask whether it's a copyright violation when you make a derivative work, it almost certainly is.

"It sounds like you might just be asking about copying genres or themes, though; usually this is no problem, copyright-wise. The creator of Pitfall isn't seeing any money from all of the side-scrolling platformers made after his game, nor can Carmack claim that Unreal is a copyright violation because Wolf3d came out first.

"So, essentially you're thinking about Metroid on the Mountain Dew website, or something similar (replace X game from company Y on a website for company Z)?

"Unless you copy everything (which you never should), the game won't be a ripoff. I can't fathom that you're going to port any game (or emulate, or what have you) to Flash without having permission to use the trademarked name and characters, because that would be a very bad idea.

How much will be reused from the original game? Any artwork or sound?"

See also

  Avoiding Plagiarism, from the the Purdue University Online Writing Lab

  MU College of Engineering Academic honesty

  William Pfeiffer, Technical Writing: A Practical Approach, Fourth edition, Prentice Hall, 2000. Chapter 13 Technical Research

  Best Practices: Intellectual Property or Scholarship