Does this website violate copyright laws?

[Pinecone333]

Wouldn't it violate copyright laws to create a virtual version of a copyrighted board game?

[VillageIdiot]

I've seen this asked about in the past, and the short answer was no.

The boring longer answer is - 'Copyright law does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form'

[Pinecone333]

Fair enough, but isn’t the use of the same map as the original a duplication of the authors original expression?

[UnknownHero]

Based on my limited layperson understanding, while the original artistic illustration of the map could be copyrighted, the gameplay and mechanics of a board game fall under the realm of patents. For example, see the US patent for the game of Monopoly: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi ... 26082).pdf

Even if diplomacy had been patented, that patent would have expired by now.

[kestasjk]

Yeah it's kind of a strange law.. I feel like the music/film/tv industry get crazy strong copyright protections, but board game creators probably don't have as much lobbying power. I think because a rulebook describes a method you can't copyright / patent a method or some such.

The classic example is Scrabulous; they couldn't stop them from running a site that hosted a clone of Scrabble, but they were able to force them to change the name based on a reasonable risk of confusion between Scrabulous and Scrabble, and the name Scrabble is trademarked.

This is why many Diplomacy clone sites will call themselves something different.


If we had to we could also change the name, but I think Hasbro/Renegade understand that sites like this have probably done more good for their sales / the community / introduced more people than anything they could've hoped to do.

I think as long as we're not creaming it in like Scrabulous was, running as a hobby preject, Hasbro/Renegade know getting litigious wouldn't help them in any way. (And as an open source project with multiple forks it'd be pretty futile)


It is a shame we can't get any official recognition from them though, despite reaching out many times over many years.. I guess they'd be worried that if they gave implied consent it might become a case like Kleenex where by not defending a trademark it becomes generic and you lose the ability to defend it later.. But it does feel a little hurtful putting in so much effort to promote their IP for free and not getting any acknowledgement at all.

I pitched ideas to Renegade like advertising the new board release here for free, a competition / tournament with the new board as a prize etc, updating the links to Avalon Hill to their page, syncing up the rulebook with theirs etc, but although the marketing guy seemed pretty keen clearly it got shut down.