So you’re a games designer and you’re worried about IP law. Well I am also a games designer and also in a previous life I got given legal compliance training and also I run my own company and also I spent twenty years on the internet getting so frustrated at people being wrong about how IP law worked I accidentally read the entirety of the UK legal basis for copyright.

Tldr you probably don’t need to worry about it.

Thanks everyone, good blog post, go home.

…

You’re still here.

We’re going to cover a few basic topics: copyright (what it covers and what it doesn’t), trademarks and patents (and why I, CJ, personally believe you should expunge both of these concepts from your mind), a brief rundown on contracts, credit and royalties, and what to put in the front matter (the bit that comes at the start of a book).

This is ABSOLUTELY NOT LEGAL ADVICE. This is at best the half baked distilation of twenty years of my own half baked understanding. Except that hopefully, twenty years of having a low tolerance for people being wrong on the internet about this means that my half baked understanding will help you.

But let me be very clear: THIS INFORMATION IS PRESENTED AS IS AND WITHOUT WARRANTY. YOU CANNOT RELY ON THIS INFORMATION ALONE AND YOU SHOULD SEEK INDEPENDENT QUALIFIED LEGAL ADVICE. I AM NOT A LEGAL PROFESSIONAL, AND THIS POST DOES NOT IMPLY OR CREATE ANY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU (THE READER) AND ME (THE AUTHOR). YOUR OWN ACTIONS ARE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Got that?

Good. For the rest of this post, please assume the advice is coming from this pikachu:

He is very dapper and looks authoratitive, but remember, he is both a pikachu and made of a polyester blend and his law degree is written in crayon.

1. Copyright and You

Here’s the most basic thing you need to know: copyright for written works in the United Kingdom of Great Britian and Northern Ireland is (at time of writing) the life of the last surviving author plus seventy years, or if the author is unknown either seventy years from first publication or seventy years from the date the work was produced or first identified. For other kinds of works, it’s slightly different: the layout of a written work is protected for twenty five years from the year of first publication, so (again at time of writing) you can freely borrow the layout of any book published prior to 2001, but not the text.

Copyright is automatic. You don’t need to do anything, there’s no magic words, you gain the right of copyright over any copyrightable work the moment you write it (or publish it in some cases). The UK doesn’t maintain any kind of copyright registration system and the websites that claim to be able to register anything for you are scams¹.

The .gov.uk website has an informative page on what copyright lets you do if someone violates your copyright rights, but the tldr is send them a legal nastygram² and then if they neither stop nor negotiate for a licence, then the answer is legal action.

This being said, the chances of someone stealing an entire game you wrote is essentially nil, but also that copyright in this instance only applies to the actual words you wrote. Lets consider two things:

First, copyright only covers creative works. The sentence “My sausage sandwich contains two and a half sausages, ketchup and mustard.” is a factual description of my lunch and is not a creative work. It is not eligible for copyright protection not because it is too short but because it is not creative. The sentence “My sausage sandwich is the meaning of life, the universe and all things porky.” may be a creative work, and may be eligible for copyright protection (2026 © CJ Shearwood do not steal) but ultimately it would be up to a court to decide.

What this means is that the game, which is a thing your written work describes, is not protected by copyright. If I, independently, explained how to play the 9th edition of Warhammer 40,000 and put it on the internet, as long as I did so in my own words using my own diagrams and using none of Games Workshop’s intelectual property, there’s a good argument that what I’ve done is perfectly legal. That being said, Games Workshop would likely initiate legal action against you, and the courts would ultimately decide³.

To reiterate this, the reason you can get away with rewriting someone else’s game is because game mechanics are descriptions of a process, and therefore facts about the world. That being said, there is a significant social element here. The game design community is small, and if someone was seen to be stealing entire portions of games other designers, even small designers, had written, the social consequences could be significant.

The other side of this though is that in reality unless you have the means to take legal action and you have a good belief that the element that someone else stole is eligible for copyright protection (i.e. they stole portions of fiction, layout, graphics, artwork or other elements of the writing that are clearly creative in nature), you are unlikely to be able to make any real consequences stick.

So what should you do? We’ll cover this more in the front matter, but sticking a basic copyright notice on your work (Copyright 2026 © Legal Entity) helps identify both the owner of the copyright and when it was produced. It is broadly my opinion that the bigger risk is that people never see your work in the first place than fretting that some large company are going to decide that your work is worth stealing, and even if they do, ideas are dime a dozen, you have to be confident in your execution of the idea.

2. Other People’s Copyright Rights

You will have likely heard a lot about “Fair Use”. Evict these two words from your mind, they are perfidious American legal terms. The British legal concept is “Fair Dealing” and functionally, forget it too. As your game is a commercial product⁴, none of the exceptions to UK copyright law will apply.

How to use copyright protected works is simple: find the person who has the rights to it, and ask them for a licence. If the author or rightsholder cannot be found (but not if you can find them and didn’t like what they said) you can apply to the Orphan Works Register for an orphan works licence.

Finally, a brief note on public domain. Public domain is a nebulous concept. Works that have left copyright protection are sometimes referred to as public domain, as in anyone can use them, but sometimes people also talk about putting works into the public domain. You cannot legally put things into the public domain, all you can do is give everyone an implicit right to use a work. But you need to be very, very, very sure that the person putting something into the public domain actually has the right to do so.

Catalogues like Wikimedia Commons have been poisoned over the years by people uploading data they have no right to do so and claiming to put it under either a copyleft or copyright-free licence. “I thought I had a licence” is not a valid legal defence.

Historical works are also a dangerous area: copyright law in the UK and internationally has changed significantly in the last century, and work that you think should be in the public domain might not be!

Photographs taken after August 1st 1989 have the same copyright protection as anything else (author’s life plus seventy years). Photographs taken AND PUBLISHED⁵ after 1956 and prior to August 1st 1989 gain copyright protection for fifty years from the date of publication. So in 2040 all photographs published prior 1989 will be in the public domain. But if the photograph is unpublished? Then it’s life of the commissioner plus seventy years.

And prior to 1956? Fifty years after the first negative was made, and the person who owned the negative at the time of it’s making is the owner of the copyright. So all pre-1956 photography (in fact all pre-1975 published photography).

So you might think “I will just go to [insert museum here] and grab a picture of [old thing]/download a photograph taken prior to 1956”. Aha. You’d think so. Well, until recently, all photography was considered to have creative merit, and therefore to have a copyright status independent of the thing being photographed: consider a photograph of Turner’s Fisherman at Sea (1796), the painting is out of copyright (by nearly two centuries) but any given photo (prior to 2023) wasn’t. So the Tate could say “photo copyright Tate 2020” because they took the photo in 2020 and charge you £75 a pop to use it.

This did change in November 2023⁶ where as long as “no creative decisions were made”, the “faithful reproduction” of an out-of-copyright work is now not eligible for copyright. So now a photograph that contains only the painting, and makes no creative choices, and is solely a faithful reproduction of the painting, is most likely not eligible for copyright protection.

Many museums and archives have take a “la la la we can’t hear you over the sound of our licencing department” approach and still charge for usage, or at the very least for access to high resolution images. And if you look at the fine print for access to archives, or even entry to galaries, most prohibit commercial photography. So, sod.

The other thing we need to talk about is Crown Copyright. That’s where the government made a thing. Crown Copyright lasts for 125 years from publication. Some but all items under Crown Copyright are available under the “Open Government Licence” which is basically “do what you want but tell people the UK government made it”. Otherwise, you have to ask the government for permission to use it.

Finally, a huge portion of stuff the US federal government produces (including almost everything NASA made) is public domain. This is about as far as I’ll go talking about international copyright law, as I could spend about this much text talking about just the DMCA and DMCA-like processes in US/international law contexts.

Now, if you choose to ignore all of this and just use what you want, the consequences are simple. They will send you a legal nastygram, they may outline their demands for a settlement then or after solicitors get involved, it may involve paying compensation, withdrawing products from sale, destruction of existing stock, or all the above. You will need a solicitor of your own. The risk is not worth the reward, so you are incentivised to get it right.

Ultimately, when in doubt, engage a solicitor, and generally stick to easily licenced works.

3. Trademarks, Trade Dress, Patents, and hurling tens of thousands of pounds at the British legal system for little concievable benefit

If there is one thing to boil my blood, it is people mixing up what copyright and trademark are for. Here is a ten second explanation:

Trademarks are a way to legally say “this identifies my work or product and if you use it in the wrong way I can sue you about it”. It has nothing to do with copyright.

Unlike copyright, trademarks are not automatic, and you have to register them with the government. This costs money to do so, and requires you to fill out specific legal and technical forms. If you want to do this, you may wish to contract with a solicitor who can better advise you. This will be expensive.

Trademarks do not come with any automatic enforcment. You are obliged to stop other people from misusing your trademarks. This means sending them a legal nastygram and then suing them if they neither stop nor licence your trademark. This is expensive. Also, one of the few exceptions to trademark usage is usage to denote compatability. I.e. Honda will have a trademark registration for the Honda Jazz. If I make a new cup holder for that kind of car, I am obviously not forbidden to sell it as “CJ’s Wonderous Automagic Cupholder for the Honda Jazz”. Honda Motor Company cannot stop me⁷ using trademark law as long as it’s clear that you are not using their trademark to big up your own image.

The main things people can do wrong with trademarks is passing off (making it look like your product or presentation is official, i.e. selling a “Honda Jazz Cup Holder” or “Cup Holder by Honda for the Honda Jazz”) and false association (making it seem like the trademark holder approves when they don’t, i.e. “Cup Holder approved for Honda Jazz”).

In the tabletop world you’ll often see oblique references to trademarks, such as “Space Carbine For Astromarine” for a 3D model or aftermarket resin part. You’ll see this for two main reasons: one is a misunderstanding of a landmark American legal ruling between Games Workshop and an aftermarket parts company⁸ wherein people think that the fact that that company sold stuff like “Thousand Sons Rhino Doors” was the problem⁹. The other is that people are making clear knockoffs and advertising your clearly resculpted model of an Ork Painboy under the title “Ork Painboy” is a really easy way to get your very own nastygram¹⁰.

If you think you want a trademark, talk to a solicitor, but I think it’s mostly a waste of time for anyone who is reading this blog post. Most of the benefit you get from a concept known as “Trade Dress”. Basically, if I make a shop and it has a distinct name and visual style, and someone else decides “why yes I will take advantage of your reputation and make my own version of your shop” you can still sue them. It’s harder than if you had a trademark, but still possible.

Moving on to patents, a patent covers a thing or process. They don’t matter. In the UK it is very hard to patent a process like a game rule, and the protection it offers you is largely theoretical, very expensive, and right thinking people will make fun of you.

4. If I teach you about contracts will you stop writing faux legalise and why this sentence could be a legally enforceable contract (kind of)

A contract in the UK is very simple: two (or more) people agree to exchange two things of value. That’s it. Offering to go to the cornershop for someone is technically a contract. You agree to fetch goods from the corner shop, in exchange for being paid back the money you’ve spent.

The important part is that for a contract to be enforcible, something of value has to change hands in both directions. “You will give me a million pounds” is not a valid contract. “I will give you one pound, and you will give me a million pounds” is probably still not a valid contract (the value of the two sides isn’t equal and you can’t argue they are¹¹) but it’s getting closer. “You will give me a rare 1949 pound coin they accidentally made out of solid gold and I will give you a million pounds” is a valid contract¹².

That’s it. It can be verbal, over the phone, or written down. As long as you both understand and agree, it’s a contract.

Now if you think that there’s going to be shenanigans, you can improve the contract. You can clarify who “you” and “I” are, you can say “by the 19th of September”, you can say “the purchaser will cover transport costs and insurance”, you can add a section to say “if it turns out it’s actually foil wrapped chocolate, the seller agrees to return the money plus a fine of ten thousand pounds”. It doesn’t have to be in that weird, stilted, formal legalease, but as you start to add extra clauses and clarifications you might see how you get to that kind of language.

But as with everything else, contracts are not self enforcing. If you sign a contract and the other party doesn’t meet their half of it, you can’t call the police. You have to sue them. This is where making your contract legally watertight comes into play, and if legal action is actually on the table, and the amounts of money are significant, or you don’t actually trust the person you’re contracting with, then paying a solicitor to help draft your contract is highly advised. If you do trust the other party, or the amounts are small (within the bounds of small claims court), you will save a lot of money by writing your own or finding a free legal template if you’re anxious about getting it right¹³.

With that out of the way, it’s time to talk about non-disclosure agreements. NDAs are a scourge, most of the time, and the astute amongst you will already have realised why. You can’t enforce a contract that only binds one party. Now, there’s an implicit “sign this NDA and you will get access to a thing that will be interesting and potentially valuable” part, but again, contracts are not self enforcing. But I write this mostly because I’ve seen a lot of people make arguments that they should force anyone who wants to see their half finished game to sign an NDA so they don’t leak stuff.

Obviously, things are different when you’re working with third parties. I have signed dozens of NDAs over the years to talk to people about projects working with big external IPs, where the rightsholder wants to control when to make a relevant announcement, but for you, person reading a mostly educational blog post about British IP law, your thing is not worth signing an NDA over.

And finally (for this section) we have to talk about copyright (and other IP rights) assignment contracts.

Assuming that you have some kind of employment as a creative or knowledge worker of some kind, you likely signed an employment contract that contains some kind of clause that says that your employer owns the rights to anything you produce during your work for them. This is a valid contractual clause, because you are exchanging your right to your work (for them) for the money they pay you.

Most of the time, it will be written with the carveouts of “during your work” and “relating to the work of your employer” which protects anything you do outside of your work that doesn’t relate. So if you work in insurance, and you make a card game about puffins, and you do all of the work outside of your working hours and not using your employer’s resources, then you’ve got nothing to worry about. If you want to be belt-and-braces about it, and you trust your employer, ask them to sign a document confirming they don’t have any interest in your entirely outside of working hours game design activities.

If your clause is broader than that, and you don’t trust your employer enough to just ask for the exemption¹⁴, seek legal advice. And don’t call the employee assistance phone number, they can’t help you with anything to do with your contract or employment rights. Find an independent solicitor.

Also check for anti-moonlighting clauses in your contracts. These will be prohibitions against doing work that’s not for your primary employer. Again, if you trust your employer, you can ask them to sign a document making it clear your game design work is fine. Otherwise, talk to an independent solicitor.

5. Credit, Royalties and not bankrupting future you

There are no laws as far as I am aware in the UK about how credit needs to be apportioned for joint creators of a creative work. There are regulations¹⁵ in areas such as the motion picture and music industries, and if you want to see how it’s done when there is serious money and serious reputations on the line, you can look at the regs in those areas.

In general though, it’s a contractual matter between you and your collaborators. Do what you want, but be fair. It’s my opinion that you should be generous in your credit, because it’s better to share the credit that comes from creative work than harbour resentment.

Royalties are also contractual matters, but unlike credits (which are functionally free) they will cost you money and might hamstring you in the future. Whilst this entire document is not legal advice, the following is also not financial advice. I am also going to use the word “royalties” to mean any agreement that you enter wherein you agree to pay other people based on the money you make.

The most obvious royalty or revenue sharing question you have is if you have multiple colaborators. You should agree in writing, as early as possible, how you will share the money the game will make and you should get it in writing, and get everyone to sign it. As the section on contracts explains, any formal agreement is a contract, so it doesn’t have to be fancy, but if people are investing significant sums of money, it’s worth considering involving a solicitor for everyone’s peace of mind.

I could write another post probably this size on the choices you have, but functionally you have two main options: either everyone shares in the business and you agree to split an appropriate payout of net profit along agreed lines (i.e. an equal share, or some agreed ratio if one party is doing more work than another), or one party operates the business and pays out royalties based on gross profit (i.e. income after costs of goods sold). You should probably talk to a solicitor and/or an accountant about your options and choices here, and also about the legal structure of your business. But in short, the former option is better for long term collaboration, the latter for one-off or intermittent collaboration.

Other people involved in the project might want royalties too. It’s reasonably common for artists to be involved in royalty agreements in exchange for reduced upfront fees. This is usually predicated on your project having a clear commercial plan, and requires that you be realistic about how much money you expect to make. But the key thing here (and for any royalty agreement) is always to offer deals in terms of gross profit. Gross profit is simple, it means as long as you don’t offer more than 100% royalties over your various agreements you can’t end up selling at a loss, and it makes calculations clear and understandable for everyone. It also protects you against future issues if your sale price changes. Too many people have, over the years, offered royalties against either the sale price, or worse, the recommended retail price, and found themselves in a position whereby either they sell the item at a loss, or they want to offer the item for distribution (or licence the game to someone else etc.) and find the agreements they signed previously functionally forbid it¹⁶.

My personal guidestar for dealing with royalties is to consider them (for yourself) to be part of the cost of the product, same as you might consider the cost of printing, and you must consider the profitability of the product after cost of goods sold and royalties. And so if you agree to generous royalty agreements, you might need to increase the cost of the product to make it worthwhile.

6. Front matter and declarations

Unlike other countries, the UK doesn’t have much in the way of law regarding what you do and don’t have to put in the front matter of a book. That’s the first proper page, where you usually have some information about the book, its contributors, where and who published it and other stuff.

There are a few things you probably should put there though, presented below in no particular order:

• A copyright statement, in the form “Copyright ©️ 2026 Author McAuthorface. All rights reserved.”, substituing the final sentence for the appropriate rights (such as a creative commons licence) if that’s so desired.
• A truncated or condensed list of authors and major contributors. Including just their names here is generally fine, with an appendix containing a more complete listing, but if it’s simple it’s worth just sticking everything in the front matter.
• Information about the edition and printing of the book, alongside when the book was produced. My personal opinion is that a book’s edition shouldn’t be increased unless changes were made to the contents beyond basic typo corrections, but reasonable minds differ here.
• A list of people to thank or dedicate the book to. Even if you are the sole author, producing a book is a complex endeavour and it’s nice to recognise the people who helped you get to this point. That said, keep it short. If you need to thank an extended number of people (i.e. you promised to do so for a kickstarter reward) do so in an appendix.
• Details of the publisher, including the GPSR Authorised Representative¹⁷ if you intend to sell the book in the EU.

Some people put other things in their front matter too, like the fonts used in the book, or information about the paper the book is printed on, or funny little sayings. In my most recent work (Hypersteel Meatgrinder), I put an appeal to General Ludd alongside a line expressly forbidding passing my work through generative AI systems. Do what you like.

If you intend to directly publish you work in other countries or other languages, please seek independent legal advice from a qualified source in that country as some countries have more specific requirements. Germany for instance has very specific requirements for the “imprint” page, which even applies to websites!

Fundamentally though, when you are publishing in English, it’s all rather lax. My opinion and advice is find a book you like that’s like the game you’re making and look at their front page. Bonus points, if it’s more than 25 years old, you can steal it almost wholesale¹⁸.

Epilogue

This is a basic runthrough of the English intellectual property law I believe that a game designer should be aware of. It is neither exhaustive nor is it guaranteed to be error free. For one, I’ve not mentioned the difference between English and Welsh law and Scottish law¹⁹ nor have I even touched on the difference in copyright eligibility between England and the USA regarding the output of computer programs²⁰.

You can personally read up on a lot of this just by searching the .gov.uk websites for copyright information. It’s all written in plain English and covers the modern context very well.

That being said, I can’t stress the value of professional advice enough. I’ve learned a lot of this one way or another, enough to muddle through it semi-professionally, but even I fall back to asking a professional when I have to. Especially where the consequences are significant.

Anyway, go forth and make stuff. What’s the worst that can happen?

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1. The one thing they are selling is a nominally independent verification that a given work existed on a given date, so if you try to sue someone for using your work, and they say “well actually I wrote it” you can go “The UK copyright registration house confirmed they saw a copy of my version two years ago”. There is no guarantee this will stand up in court, and in this day and age, records of your creation of the work (like file metadata) probably help just as much. ↩︎
2. This would be the place to talk about the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, DMCA notices and supra-legal copyright regimes such as Google/Youtube’s Content ID system, but this is a) a post about UK law and b) it’s already too long. ↩︎
3. You can sue anyone for any reason at any time. When this is done without merit, it’s sometimes called lawfare, and sometimes called a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, or a SLAPP. Some countries have anti-SLAPP laws, the UK has very poor protection against SLAPPing. ↩︎
4. I’m assuming that since you’re reading this, your game is a commercial product. If not, this still applies but you might be able to eek out some of the educational exemptions. The big exemption here for everyone is parody and satire, but that’s a very narrow road to walk. Seek legal advice if you really want to do satire. ↩︎
5. What qualifies publication? I don’t know. I asked three legal scholars and got five answers. They are, in no particular order:
   1) the date that a third party could see the photo beyond being shown it by the owner of the physical photo
   2) the date the photo was incorporated into a larger work, such as a newspaper or photographic collection
   3) the date the photograph was made available for purchase or licencing
   4) the date the photograph was first displayed publicly
   5) the date anyone who was not the photographer or commissioner first made a copy
   ↩︎
6. See THJ v Sheridan ↩︎
7. They might be able to stop you for other reasons, but not using trademark law. ↩︎
8. See Games Workshop vs Chapterhouse. ↩︎
9. No, the problem was that Chapterhouse made parts that were clearly both duplicates of and direct replacements for Games Workshop products, being sold under the same names. They also sold many parts that shared aesthetic similarities with GW parts, for the purpose of compatibility, for which GW’s legal complaints were thrown out. GW’s legal strategy was not without issues, and they were rebuked by the court for several elements, but Chapterhouse were skating the line of what they could do under US law and were well over it in several places. That doesn’t change that you can use trademarks to indicate compatibility. ↩︎
10. If you’re making it available commercially. Non-commercial reproduction is a complex topic. But also, see footnote 3. ↩︎
11. There is the legal concept of a peppercorn, which is the smallest unit of value for which it is legal to exchange in a contract, but the situations in which it is fair and legal to exchange an item of value for a legal peppercorn are complicated. But, this is why you hear about things like companies being sold for one pound. You can’t just gift a company to someone, but you can sell it, and if the company is nominally worthless then a single pound is a fair exchange. In other cases, a peppercorn (often a pound, or ten pounds or whatever) is paid as rent, but the peppercorn is a financial representation of a broader, non-financial relationship and therefore is still considered fair, even when the thing it is being exchanged for is, say, the right to occupy a million pound house. ↩︎
12. So there is the slight wrinkle that a contract needs to be an exchange, and not two unrelated actions. So technically this isn’t a valid contract if you get technical as it’s two unrelated actions, but there’s the implication of “I will give you the gold coin, and in exchange, you will give me a million pounds” that would probably hold up in court. ↩︎
13. Most professional associations will have template contracts for stuff like artistic commisions, typesetting jobs or the like, vetted by their in house solicitors. Your local area may also have a business development service that can put you in touch with the right resources in this area. But be aware, these are often little more than advertising services for stuff you will not need, and there is an element that an IP solicitor will try to sell you the most maximal protection you can buy, because that’s their job. ↩︎
14. This is kind of a difficult piece of advice to give, because at time of writing I know full well that the job market is terrible, but referencing footnote 3 again, your employer can sue you for anything at any time and if you are worried that your employer will respond poorly to discovering you’re doing anything on the side, that might be a sign that you need to find a new job. But also, unless your job is truely terrible, it’s probably wiser to delay doing commercial game development until you are sure that your employer isn’t going to be able to screw you over and claim your work for their own. ↩︎
15. The regulations here I’m talking about are typically union rules. Check out stuff like SAG-AFTRA and Equity rules on crediting. ↩︎
16. Rascal have an extensive article on Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast which I personally have some issues with the framing of, but is ultimately a story about a company ruined by bad financial agreements, whose flagship product has been gutted because they agreed to wildly over-generous royalties to various contributors which Steve Jackson Games could never agree to, resulting in their contributions being removed (and presumably replaced) in the new edition. The article is well worth the dollar entry fee. ↩︎
17. Yes, even books need authorised representatives as far as I’ve been told. No, I don’t know how that works for print on demand titles. Talk to the POD platform you’re using to figure it out, and hope they know. Companies that provide authorised representative services will have opinions, but their opinions are likely to somewhat maximalist. ↩︎
18. Don’t actually do this. Not least because fashions in these things have changed in the last twenty five years. ↩︎
19. IP law is not devolved so it mostly doesn’t matter, except where it does in terms of basic legal concepts. ↩︎
20. The US Copyright Office does not recognise the eligibility for copyright protection for anything that isn’t the result of human effort. So generative AI outputs suffer the same fate as animal selfies: a weird legal limbo where they don’t confer ownership rights to anyone. ↩︎