Research On The Legal Protection Path Of Online Game Rule

In recent years,the online computer game market has developed fastly and the market scale of the game industry has been rapidly expanding.Online computer games have become one of the entertainment ways of people’s daily life.However,with the rapid development of the online computer game industry,online game infringement is common,most of which are disputes because of the same rules of online computer games.By retaining the game rules of the games that have been publicly released by other game developers,the imitators launch a new game highly similar to their imitation cyber game after making minor changes in other game elements such as picture design and game music and so on.This approach will not only attack the creative enthusiasm of game developers,but also not conducive to the diversified development of the game industry.Game rules are the most important competitiveness of online computer games.How many game users a game can attract and how much market share it can occupy largely depend on the playability and interest of online game rules.However,the current game rules of online computer game protection in China are not perfect enough,and the online game rules,as the most important element of online games,have not received due public attention.In view of this,this paper intends to solve the problems faced by the protection of computer game rules in China,and look forward solutions for reference,in order to improve the legal protection path of online game rules.Online computer game rules are the playing method of the online game,which are set by the game developer,and the game players operate and interact within the framework of the rules set by them.According to the concept of game design,the game rules can be divided into online basic game rules,online specific game rules and invisible rules.The legal protection of basic rules and specific rules is the focus of the legal protection of online game rules.Because of its particularity,invisible rules are difficult to be involved in disputes,so they have no discussion value.At present,the legal protection of online game rules is faced with the generalized application of the protection way of anti unfair competition law,the problems to the legality of the protection way of copyright law,and the conflict between anti unfair competition law and copyright law.At present,the mainstream view is that scholars consider the anti unfair competition law should only provide supplementary protection for the intellectual property law in protecting intellectual products.However,through the search of the judgment documents related to the infringement of online game rules,it is found that most courts take the anti unfair competition law as the judgment basis,It is generally believed that the defendant’s activities breake the principle of good morality and recognized market business ethics which sets in paragraph 2 of the anti unfair competition law and becomes a part of unfair competition,and it is not only easy to lead to the expandtion and application of the protection way of the anti unfair competition law,but also it can be found from the case analysis that this way will shrink the working space of the intellectual property system and other disadvantages.Online game rules are the result of game designers’ labor creation.They naturally have the attribute of knowledge products,and the protection of online computer game rules is in line with the legislative purpose of copyright law to encourage creation.At present,China indirectly protects the online game rules by splitting or audio-visual works protection mode,which can not fastly regulate the infringement of online computer game rules.From the perspective of copyright grant,the online computer game rules are copyrightable,and the specific online game rules are highly similar,which should be directly protected by the copyright law.The protection of online game rules should be carried out from the level of intellectual property rights.First,determine the protection boundary of copyright law.We can start with the protection of game rules of novel games and the protection of game rules of non novel games,and then clarify the scope of protection,and then clarify the applicable elements of copyright law with the infringement judgment standard of three-step identification law.For the game rules that cannot be protected by the copyright law but have certain economic value,the anti unfair competition law can provide supplementary protection,but the protection path of the anti unfair competition law should be improved first.The path of protecting the game rules by the anti unfair competition law can be optimized by clarifying the applicable conditions of the general terms and adopting multiple interest measurement standards.The reasonable determination of the qualifications for the supplementary application of the anti unfair competition law should be based on exhausting the provisions of the copyright law and the protecting legal intersets should be limited to the relevant market scope of the sued works.