quote:
Original post by Rochnarand
As far as the company name, lets say I want to call our company "Mr. Farty Pants Games" (not the real name, feel free to take it ;p ) . All I want to do is to prevent some other company from calling their game company the same name. Do I need to do something to prevent this or is it automatically protected as soon as we announce it? Is filing DBA the same in California?
As far as doing things by credit card, hell I''m all for it. I just want to keep things as simple as possible.
As far as registering copyright, am I just being stupid paranoid by worrying about putting our game in the mail?
I am honestly not trying to make things any more complex than they have to be, but I know absolutely nothing about any of this and I don''t want to regret not doing something later on.
----Steve
Registering the DBA will do nothing to prevent anyone from using your company name in another county. At least that is the way that it is done in New York State. So, you might register "Fantsy Pants Software" in one county, and someone else can do the same thing in an adjacent county. If you Incorporate though, they do a full name search and there can only be one corporation in the US(it might be the state, but I''m pretty sure it covers the whole US) that has that same name, although smaller businesses may have that name as a registered DBA. Think about businesses like pizza shops. I have a company called Mike''s Pizzeria. Doesn''t that seem pretty common? It probably is. And I''m sure there are dozens of them registered across the US.
My advice would be to get the domain name you want, and then register a DBA as a Sole Proprietorship. Nobody wants to open a company for which the .com domain is already taken. If
www.gamethoughts.com were taken, I''d have chosen a different name for my company.
I know you said that you have partners, but for tax purposes, I would recommend a sole proprietorship. Just get written agreements with everyone that profits shall be split, written responsibilities, etc. You should have that for a general partnership anyway. The reason I suggest this is that the difference between the tax filings for a sole proprietorship vs. a general partnership is no less than 10 pages. I''m not exaggerating. It''s only a one page form for a SP and it''s about 12 for a GP. Not to mention, if you have a knowledgeable CPA do your taxes at the end of the year, it can save you at least $200 in CPA fees, plus the additional money he''ll be able to get you through all of the business expenses.
Works are protected by copyright so long as you include the copyright notice with it. Registering it gives you additional protections, although I looked into it once and didn''t feel that some of it was worth it. My understanding (and I could be wrong here) is that you have to submit a copy of your source code. It then becomes public record. This is why most companies don''t submit all of their source code. They might submit all of the graphics, the dialogue scripts, etc. But I seriously doubt that companies like Microsoft submit their full source code of Windows, even though it is protected by copyright.
You can release a beta version, and it is protected. This is neglecting the point that if you say to someone you are releaseing something, and they see it and decide to make a clone of it, if you''ve been working on it for a year, how long is it going to take them to duplicate their efforts? Quite a while I think. Most of the time, you really just don''t need to worry about it. If the game becomes big enough that you do need to worry about it, you''ll have the money at that point to hire good lawyers to take care of the problem for you.
Looking for an honest video game publisher? Visit
www.gamethoughts.com
After all, who defines what is finished? I see games getting patched for months after they are released... they''re obviously not really finished. Since ''finished'' is such a subjective concept, it doesn''t apply. Perhaps you were getting it confused with "published" which, in this context, merely means the act of putting it on paper/website/cd/whatever. As soon as it hits a medium, it''s protected. 
