Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic: copyright in card games
client, 2018
The Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School advised Hidden Switch on copyright and intellectual property in card games, ahead of a commercial release of Spellsource.
Card games are a difficult case for copyright. Rules are not protected, and every game in the genre is built from the same few verbs, so the question of how close one game may sit to another is not answered by reading the statute.
In 2018 the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, part of the Berkman Klein Center, took Hidden Switch as a client and worked through it: where the risk in a game of this kind actually sits, across its mechanics and its content, and what to do about it before releasing commercially. Christopher Bavitz supervised, with Mason Kortz as clinical instructor and John Quagliariello and Yongjin Chang as the students on the matter.
The game is Spellsource, which began as Minionate.