During my recent stay in Seoul Korea, I visited the largest underground entertainment and shopping center in Asia (the COEX Mall), where the Microsoft and Sony corporations have built spacious "game zones," providing public access to hundreds of game stations and video games for free. Each year the center hosts international competitions where teams of players collectively compete with others online, and before the eyes of large audiences, to win multi-thousand dollar prizes. # Here are a few interesting facts: total sales in the video game industry reached 7.3 billion last year; sales from the online multiplayer games sector by itself is expected to grow to $763 million by 2007; big business in the video game industry is coming from adults, where the average age of a game player is 30; and video games have outsold movie tickets in the United States 10 to 9. Not bad for a business that began as an incidental offspring of the computer software industry.

The video game industry, even though still dependent on advancements in the computer software and hardware sectors, has evolved beyond recognition in relation to its humble origins in games such as Pong and Pacman, developed 50 years ago on refrigerator size computers by timid software engineers. Modern video games have intricate storylines, bold colors and a plethora of characters and backdrops. As such, many video games today are written, designed and choreographed by writers, producers, directors and talent with experience in the arts and movie industry before a single line of code is written.

For the above reasons, the legal issues related to the protection and enforcement of rights in video game products have become more sophisticated and complex. Luckily, however, various legal means are available to help protect different aspects of a video game product, especially the functional and operational aspects, which may be protected by a patent. Alternatively, certain features may be maintained as trade secrets. Additionally, most characters, scenes, music, dialogues, story lines and source code may be protected under copyright laws as long as each contains original works of authorship.

Despite of the availability of the above legal means, there is a surprising and somewhat inexplicable lack of intellectual property protection in the video game industry. This imbalance within the video game industry is cultivating a new and relatively unexploited legal battlefield that is resulting in large judgments against infringers and licensing opportunities for those who have diligently pursued their legal right to obtain and register the respective patents and copyrights.

The 1997 case of Alpex Computer Corp. v. Nintendo Co. is among the first cases involving video game patent infringement. In that case, Nintendo was ordered to pay $253 million to Alpex for infringing its patent for a machine configured to play multiple games, in contrast to the older arcade systems that could only play a single game. More recently, in March 2005, the United States Federal court in the Northern District of California found Sony guilty of patent infringement and entered a judgment ordering Sony to pay $84 million to Immersion Corp., which had a patent covering the vibration feature incorporated in the Play Station’s game controller.

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