Book Details

Intellectual Property in the Digital Games Industry

This English-language professional monograph focuses on the legal framework and judicial practice of intellectual property protection for video games in China.

Video games are no longer merely entertainment products. They are complex digital products combining computer software, moving images, visual art, music, literary expression, character designs, interactive rules, user data and business models. As China’s video-game industry has developed, disputes involving game rules, visual presentation, characters, source code, gameplay mechanics and so-called “reskinned games” have become increasingly important in both intellectual-property theory and practice.

The book systematically examines copyright, trademark and patent protection, unfair competition, administrative regulation and criminal liability under Chinese law, and further discusses standards for determining video-game infringement and comparative developments in Chinese and U.S. copyright jurisprudence.

In relation to infringement analysis, it addresses the protection of game rules, the copyright status of the overall audiovisual presentation, protection routes for individual game elements, source-code protection and methods for assessing substantial similarity between video games. It also examines common industry issues such as reskinned games, imitation of gameplay mechanics, bad-faith registration of character names and confusion involving game identifiers, with reference to Chinese judicial practice.

The book also draws on U.S. video-game copyright cases, including Tetris, Triple Town and Bang!, to compare judicial developments in the two countries concerning copyright protection, substantial similarity and the boundaries of protection for game rules.

Rather than treating video-game disputes as an isolated category of infringement cases, the book approaches them through legal rules, judicial practice, technological facts and industry development, presenting the protection boundaries of highly digitalized video games within the existing intellectual-property system and introducing China’s legal framework and practice to an international professional readership.

Principal Areas of Inquiry