Open Gaming Licenses and Alternatives: How Roleplaying Games are Protecting Their Copyrights
From a legal standpoint, Creative Commons licenses present a stark trade-off for commercial tabletop ecosystems: enabling privatization of community-built derivatives, or effectively foreclosing creators’ ability to reserve proprietary storylines or monetizable supplements. Publishers have adopted bespoke open-gaming frameworks that calibrate grants, attribution, irrevocability, and registration mechanics to preserve downstream creativity while managing litigation risk and market incentives. The real question is whether these companies should be responsible for balancing these values without any guidance from a federal government that is constitutionally empowered to strike that balance fairly.
Game Development and Copyright Infringement: Valve, South Korea, and <em> Dark and Darker </em>
This case study illustrates how intellectual property affects the fastest-growing entertainment medium in the world through an analysis of the legal drama surrounding Dark and Darker, a hit indie game that was delisted from digital storefronts following allegations of copyright infringement.