Legal Regulation of Computer Games

Computer games include many component elements. This distinguishes modern computer games from their predecessors - and at the same time reflects a greater number of professionals involved in the development, as well as a greater number of creative elements, many of which claim to be legal. The sharp increase in the popularity of computer games has led to the fact that there is a need to establish their legal regulation. However, the differences between computer games and other objects of intellectual property have led to difficulties in determining the legal regime that best suits their specifics. This work is aimed at studying the legal regulation of rights to a computer game. On the basis of the analysis of special literature and judicial practice, various points of view are considered, revealing the essence of a computer program, the content of the rights to it, and ways to protect them. The study concluded that a computer game is a multimedia product, which is one of the types of complex objects. The mode of a complex object, in turn, facilitates the introduction of a computer game into civilian circulation, since all the necessary rights for this are consolidated with the producer - the person who organized the creation of the game. The model of intellectual rights to a computer game is a multi-level system. At the initial levels are the rights to the individual constituent elements of the game, including other complex objects included in its composition. The final level is the rights to the computer game as a whole as a multimedia product. This group of rights belongs to the producer. Personal non-property rights to individual copyright objects included in a computer game remain with their creators.