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IP protection for online game site

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Thunder:
I posted about this in the copyright forum....no replies, maybe not the right forum.

My partner and I have been running an online game mostly as a hobby for several years. However, we'd now like to see if we can interest investors in getting involved to take the game to a much wider audience. The game is unique in many ways, however not so unique that the concept is copyrightable.

My question is....what steps can I take to protect us if I send business plans detailing everything to potential investors? In other words, how do we prevent them from simply using our ideas and shutting us out?

Zonath:
I think you may be a bit confused as far as what is or is not copyrightable.  Copyright doesn't really require any amount of uniqueness or novelty (if it did, there would be a lot of entertainment products which would not qualify for copyright, since there are a lot of derivative products out there.)  The only thing that's really required for copyright protection is that the work contain some amount of original expression.  Additionally, the computer code itself can be protected via copyright.  So, assuming your game contains something that's at least your original expression, it should be afforded some copyright protection.  How much protection it gets is something of an open question, and depends on a lot of factors, but you would at least be protected from someone stealing your source code and running your game on their own servers (assuming you have the resources to pursue such a case, of course.)

As far as your business plans and any other information you don't want widely-disclosed goes, those could presumably be protected through trade secret laws.  In order to get trade secret protection, you need to take reasonable steps to protect the information from public disclosure.  In general, you should be looking for a good non-disclosure agreement and should not be sharing any sensitive information with anyone who has not signed your non-disclosure agreement.  Of course, the assistance of an attorney to draft your non-disclosure agreements and to suggest additional steps can be invaluable.

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