There are contracts for just about everything in the gaming industry, whether they are terms of employment or licensing and collaboration agreements.
Employment Contract: An Employment Contract determines the terms of employment in a company, what they want you to do for them and in return what they will do for you. The video game industry contract is likely to include benefits, confidentiality, terms of inventions and also terms on competing companies.
Benefits: This will decide whether your contract will include; health insurance, bonuses and vacations. Your opening wage will also often be there.
Confidentiality: This will state to the employee that under no circumstances do they reveal secrets of the company, to anyone outside especially competing companies. It will also often state the penalty if the employee was to be indiscrete.
Inventions: In the video games industry (and any other technology based industries) it will likely state that if the employee was to ever invent anything while working in the company’s name it would become the company’s property. This clause would only apply to an invention relevant to the company’s line of business, so a games design would certainly qualify if employed at a gaming company.
Non-Compete Clause: It is likely (especially in a competitive industry) there will be a non-competing clause in an employee’s contract. This means that if the employee knew any secret knowledge from the company and was then to leave the non-compete clause in their contract would mean that they have to take (paid) leave for a certain amount of time before moving on to a new company so that any sensitive information they would know, would not be as important later on when they came under a new employer.
Development Agreement: The Development agreement is a contract made between a publishing company and a developing company. They will state standard information from each company (e.g. Phone numbers, addresses.) As well as the company directors and most importantly the project they have decided to develop. There will then be the terms of how much the publisher is paying the developers as well as royalty rates. Ownership agreements will also be brought up, deciding whether the publisher or the developers will have the rights to the IP. Finally the publisher and developers will make warranty agreements taking full responsibilities of their duties and what would happen if a lawsuit was to happen because of their actions.
License Agreements: When a Video Game Publisher wants to make a game using a licensed IP of a movie or a book, they have to make a contract between themselves and the owner of the exclusive rights to the IP. They first must agree on what is being licensed and then they decide what the publisher will be using the license for (so if they have only agreed to a Wii game, if the publisher also wants to make a Playstation version they may have to pay a little bit more.) It will also decide where the game will be published, how much the Publisher will pay for the license and how long the term of agreement will last (it’s usually no longer than five years.)
NDA’s and Confidentiality Agreements: Non-Diclosure Agreements and confidentiality agreements are practically the same thing. Both are so that if one party wants to business with another party by revealing a secret of an invention or design that hasn’t been publicly announced, the NDA or Confidentiality agreement is formed so the party that is doing business with the other won’t disclose secret information.
Collaboration Agreements: The above types of contracts cover the most frequent types of contract in the mainstream game industry. But a lot of people are building indie games or hobby games, and for those folks a very important need is an agreement that cover the all-important issues of ownership and compensation in the creation of games that exist outside of the mainstream industry. Games that might or might not ever generate any money. The majority of hobby and indie projects fail, and a huge factor in those failures is who owns what, who's supposed to do what, and who's going to get what. A collaboration agreement sets forth in clear terms how the indie or hobby project is managed and controlled, who owns the IP, how the game is intended to be used, how any possible income is to be handled, and how termination of the project is to be governed. Bibliography
http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/ - IP info
hawkip.com – IP Illustration
law.ed.ac.uk-Copyright image
en.wikipedia.org- Info
decodeunicode.org- Copyright and Trademark signs
reidsteel.aero- Patent Certificate
www.sloperama.com- Contractual Info
matnagger-mcnagger.blogspot.com- Gender Sign
jonchoo.blogspot.com- PEGI Signs
http://www.womeningames.com/- Info
bafta.org- Picture of Miyamoto-san
spong.com
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