A few weeks back, there was a conference held at Second Life about the expansion of the gaming experience of users to other virtual worlds as well, like InWorldz. During the talk, there was an issue discussed regarding owning your own virtual work. This topic has been talked about and debated on for the last few months. After a lot of introspection, this is what I found. If you want to preserve your work as your own, get it copyrighted or DMCA approved.
Copyrighting originally was on tangible things. Later even photographs were included in the list of things that could be copyrighted. Since the emergence of computer generated works to imitate reality has become a trend in not only the gaming industry but also education, research, military etc., the governments are actively amending their country’s Copyright Act(s).
Today, you can have the ownership and copyright your blog, website, 3D objects, works or worlds. Although there are still issues to be handled like: if you create virtual reality using programs and it is so close to the actual reality, i.e., “fact,” then how do you determine or copyright the work which is a representation of fact. Read more about such issues in a detailed article on Computer Law.
History of Copyright
I could give you a brief history, but its better if you would read the following links:
- The other way is to copyright your work in your country. As I am from India, this is the site to register for Copyright. You can search for your country in the same way, as well as through the list of countries in the Berne Convention
