Online Story Publishing and Theft Thread

I was wondering what you guys thought about me publishing the complete story for my game on a wiki I keep and manage online, along with the complete details of my game, including items list, magic, quests, etc... Am I protected if somebody decides to use it for themselves? Should I keep it more private? What are you thoughts?

Many thanks.

Unless you are the next minecraft -type of entrepeneur/game developer, I think you are relativly safe.

Still, if you want hardcore proof that it's yours, then print the story, mail it to yourself, don't open the letter. Then you've got proof.

Reqieumthefallen wrote: Still, if you want hardcore proof that it's yours, then print the story, mail it to yourself, don't open the letter. Then you've got proof.

That's a pretty good idea.

Reqieumthefallen wrote: Still, if you want hardcore proof that it's yours, then print the story, mail it to yourself, don't open the letter. Then you've got proof.

That's what my college music teacher told us to do for song writing. I always thought that was a novel, but good, solution.

It's worth noting though that unless they directly plagiarise your work it's going to be pretty hard to prove they stole the idea and possibly expensive to stop them (even if you're right). If it's really such an issue perhaps find a way to prevent it being shown to people without an account or something. I have no idea how wikis work, so I don't know whether that's an option.

Reqieumthefallen wrote: Still, if you want hardcore proof that it's yours, then print the story, mail it to yourself, don't open the letter. Then you've got proof.

That's called a poor man's copyright, you can google it for more info, but it's easily faked and definitely not hardcore proof.

I guess the key is physical presence: because it's so damn easy to falsify digital records.

If you are looking to do a wiki for development purposes, then why don't you use a project management site like clockingit, which, has it's own private wiki / forums and so on where you can update info for the team without the whole world seeing it.

Then once you've released the game just copy it all over to an actual public wiki.

Edited by: Tetsuo3

US copyright office on “poor mans copyright”: Copyright.gov

It won't really matter anyway. What you copyright is the story, not the individual elements of the story. You can't copyright proper names, that's a trademark. You can't copyright ideas.

So, you can't have a cool spell called “Ultra-Whiz-Duper-Slam” and expect nobody to copy the name unless you trademark it. You could get people to stop but there's tons of Nintendo IP stuff on this site & Nintendo has right in their copyright FAQ that they don't allow anyone to use their IP w/o licensing it. You'd need to trademark it, that's why you can't have a character named “Zelda” and “Link” in a game or a weapon called the “Master Sword”. You can do the exact same story with similar elements (guy saves princess & defeats evil, swords, pig baddies, etc) but can't copy their stuff as a whole.

So if you don't want people to copy your ideas then don't post them where people can see them. At best, don't post them until the game is out & it won't matter any more.