A Comparative Study of the Legal Protection of Video Games; with emphasis on Iranian and US laws

Video games are one of the modern embodiments of entertainment that their legal protection is usually carried out through means of copyright; this course of action however, cannot be considered flawless as it includes shortcomings that emanate from the very nature of this form of protection; as a result, defining a pervasive frame of protection for these intellectual phenomena must be sought through means of industrial property protection, including patents, industrial designs and trademark. In this work, by resorting to comparative analysis of United States and Iran’s legal systems, we concluded that, as opposed to current methods, effective protection of video games needs thorough exploitation of legal capacities in both branches of intellectual property law. Moreover, reserving some technical parts of video games as trade secrets is another possibility that can be very effective, provided that the exploitation of the game is not against confidentiality of those parts.