Analysis On Online Game Works Copyright Protection Based On The Legend Of Hearthstone Case

As an industry, innovation is the lifeblood of online games. But as a tool to make money, copy is the most efficient way to develop an online games.Copycat online game can greatly reduce development costs, this advantage of copycat online game makes the game companies more interested in imitation rather than innovation, which exacerbated excessive homogenization phenomenon of the online game industry. The lack of a clear position of online game on copyright law is the reason excessive homogenization which had discouraged the long-term development of the online game industry.Online game is protected weakly,which can be solve by define the position of online game on the copyright law. This paper based on the analysis of “The Legend of Hearthstone” case, extracted the dispute point of departure from the basic facts, combined with the current plight of online game copyright protection, the necessity of copyright laws to protect online game and compared with foreign online games protect mode to make recommendations of copyright protection of online game.This paper is divided into five parts.The first part extracts the two dispute points through introduces the basic content of the case.One is whether online game should be protected as a whole, the other is whether the game should be a work with independent status.The second part discussed the dilemma which online game protection faces with. This part works separately from the existing copyright law does not cover the type of network games and in practice there are a lot infringement of online game. The former compare the network games with computer software, collective works and video works, get the conclusion that the existing copyright law can not protect the network effectively, then make the following discussion more convincing, while the latter introduces some plagiarism violations in practice.The third part is whether the online games work worth the copyright law to protect and the online games' economic basic and indicate that the protection of online game is not enough.The fourth part is a comparative study of domestic and foreign online games protected mode. This section select the United States and Japan's protected-mode to compare with China and analysis the advantages and disadvantages of the United States and Japan's protected mode, combined with the first two parts of this paper, draw a conclusion that online game works should have an independent status on copyright law. This is the innovation of this paper.The fifth part is the system construction of China's online game copyright protection. This section builds China's online game copyright protection system from both the legislative and judicial proposals on the basis of the above part of paper.