Legal and Ethical considerations [WEEK 5]

 Legal Considerations-

To ensure that we are complying with copyright rules, all assets in our game should be made by us and not heavily inspired or plagiarized from anything else. According to GOV.UK (Anon n.d.) copyright laws protect an IP from plagiarism and Illegal distribution, If you were to break a copyright law you may be liable to being sued by a company. On top of all the assets being our own, if we want to use any music we will make sure to use royalty free sounds and tracks, or if we have time, perhaps talk to some music students to see about commissioning our own soundtrack. That way we won't run into any copyright problems in the sound aspect. Our logo will also be our own, as well as our studio name.

Ethical Considerations -

We have chosen to stick with the theme of just anxiety, and based all of the content in the game on our own experiences dealing with social anxiety, anxiety around change, and the anxieties that come with new responsibilities. We chose to go down this route as opposed to perhaps representing some other mental illnesses as we felt we could not represent them as well as someone who actually deals with those conditions, whilst we could do some research into it, we wanted our game to be something people could relate with rather than what a website tells us about a certain condition. Because our audience is teens aged 14 and above we also feel that these themes will resonate with them too, with school bringing its own worries and anxieties. With this said, we will have a look at some of the effects anxiety has on someone, through the NHS website just to make absolutely sure we are representing this topic in a good light.

Itch.io terms of use:

Becoming a publisher [someone who uploads a game onto Itch.io] requires you to be at least 18 years of age or “or possess legal parental or guardian consent” (Itch 2024). As we are all adults this is not an issue. Something we will have to consider though is if our game complies with the Acceptable Use Policy(Itch 2024) In which we cannot depict and discrimination, Non fictional bullying, Depictions of intolerance and promoting illegal acts, Breaching copyright laws by posting IP that we do not have permission to use, Creating harmful programs, and collecting information. Our game does not do any of this and as such we will be abiding by the policy. 

A copyright claim would be something quite significant as according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Itch 2024) the Owners of the IP reserve the right to sue any offender breaching the copyright laws. All of the content in our game is made by us, we have made sure that all the art is ours and the designs are not derived from any other media.

There is also a few rules surrounding payment, but as our game will be a free game this is not something we have to really consider.

                                       

Steam Terms of use -

Under steam's terms of use we are responsible for the content that we put out and ensuring that it is suitable for the correct audience, anything uploaded to the steam User generated content section (UGC) is technically owned by steam (Steam 2024) , meaning that it is protected by copyright if someone tries to copy our project. However if we are to breach copyright terms, unlike Itch.io where the victim of plagiarism will sue you directly, steam holds the right to demand a monetary reconciliation for both themselves and the victim of plagiarism. Overall it seems there is a lot more to steam's terms of use, however looking at our project it doesnt seem like we would violate any of those terms. We also would have to pay to get our game onto steam, unlike Itch.io which is free, Currently it is $100 to create a store page (GDevelop.io 2024) so whilst this might be an option in the future this is something quite far out of reach for now.

                                     

Bibliography :

Websites -

Itch, 2024. itch.io Terms of Service[online]. Available at: https://itch.io/docs/legal/terms   [Accessed 26 October 2024]. 

Anon, No Date. How copyright protects your work [online]. GOV.UK.

Available at: https://www.gov.uk/copyright[Accessed 26 October 2024]. 

Gdevelop.io, No Date. How to Publish your Game on Steam (and Why You Should)[online].Gdevelop.io. Available at: https://gdevelop.io/page/how-to-publish-your-game-on-steam-and-why-you-should [Accessed 26 October 2024]. 

Steam, 2024. Steam Subscriber Agreement [online]. Steam. Available at: https://store.steampowered.com/subscriber_agreement/#6  [Accessed 26 October 2024]. 

Software -

Adobe, 1987. Adobe Photoshop [software], Windows 10. San Jose, CA: Adobe Publishing.

Celsys, 2001. Clip Studio Paint [software], Windows 10. Tokyo, Japan: Celsys Inc. Available at: https://www.clipstudio.net/en/index_d/  [Accessed 26 October 2024].

Firealpaca, 2011. Firealpaca [software], Windows 10. Tokyo, Japan: PGN Inc.. Available at: https://firealpaca.com/  [Accessed 26 October 2024].

Ren’py, 2004. Ren’py [software], Windows 10. Python. Available at: https://www.renpy.org/ [Accessed 26 October 2024].