Protecting My Intellectual Property

In class we learned about the four basic forms of intellectual property protection known as Trademarks, Copyrights, Patents, and Trade Secrets. Given that video games are primarily a form of art, it can be difficult to figure out where protections would be most appropriate. Any sort of names or symbols associated with the company or any of it's game products would certainly be trademarked, to protect anybody else from taking over the brand and profiting from or representing it in a way that would be counter to the companies goals. Copyrights would be used to protect any of the specific artwork produced for any of the games, as well as any music, story-line literature, or any other form of expression used to flesh out the world we develop. What we did learn in class that I had never heard of previously is that source code can also be protected with a copyright as a form of literature, and this would certainly be something to look into when creating these mobile apps. As far as the initial stages of the company, I don't see any use at this point for patents, although they would certainly come in handy if we decided to ever branch of to new forms of hardware specific to the company. Any code or business practices that don't seem applicable to copyright protections would definitely protect as much as possible as trade secrets. Given the scope of projects and the vulnerabilities software has in general to hacking, this might be a difficult protection to maintain. Fortunately most of the brand would depend on company reputation along with specific art and literature, that should be easy enough to protect with copyrights and trademarks.