1. Printing: This poster is 48” wide by 36” high. It’s designed to be printed on a large-format printer. Customizing the Content: The placeholders in this poster are formatted for you. Type in the placeholders to add text, or click an icon to add a table, chart, SmartArt graphic, picture or multimedia file. To add or remove bullet points from text, just click the Bullets button on the Home tab. If you need more placeholders for titles, content or body text, just make a copy of what you need and drag it into place. PowerPoint’s Smart Guides will help you align it with everything else. Want to use your own pictures instead of ours? No problem! Just right-click a picture and choose Change Picture. Maintain the proportion of pictures as you resize by dragging a corner. Videogames and Intellectual Property: The Ongoing Controversy These cheap knock - offs, although admittedly pretty fun, are ways for small developers to make games without having to come up with an original idea. Though many games are programmed from scratch, it is the art style and conceptual ideas under scrutiny from the original copyright holders Some bootleg game titles include : Sonic the Hedgehog for the SNES and Puckman Pockimon ( a PacMan and Pokemon blend ). HOW ARE THEY LEGAL? NOTABLE PATENTS Cloned consoles are a different story. As long as the hardware does not infringe on an existing patent, then the clone creator can make and sell as they please. Seen here is the Famicom, clone of the NES. MODDING HARDWARE At what point does modding a console become an act to intentionally play pirated games? Isn’t the firmware part of the hardware? The DMCA says no, but the Electronic Freedom Foundation says yes. People are facing jail time after being charged with piracy. Piracy is an act against restrictive policies, not to gain profit. Bootleg Games These games can be legal in several different ways. The first is that if a independent developer creates their own code for the game then that is theirs and theirs alone. If you notice, the vast majority of knock-offs do not contain heavy visual art ideals, just mainly code. Another way is if they secure a license from the copyright holder, although they rarely choose this route. Ultimately, many of these bootleggers aren’t in it for the money. As long as their work is not monetized, the IP holders generally do not have a problem. There are many patents regarding the hardware in the videogame industry. One main one is the vibrating controller (seen below). Ideas we have come to not even think about while playing are the target of big companies. Making modifications to your console in the U. S is very illegal and none too popular. But in places like China, it ’ s the only way to play. There are thousands of street vendors and store owners that you can pay to mod your system. In the U. S modding the hardware is not illegal, when you buy it it ’ s yours. However, for a useful console hack one needs to change the firmware ( the embedded software ) within the device. This is illegal by the DMCA. WHY IS THIS SO CONTROVERSIAL? “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," -Gabe Newell Valve CEO OR IS IT?

2. Printing: This poster is 48” wide by 36” high. It’s designed to be printed on a large-format printer. Customizing the Content: The placeholders in this poster are formatted for you. Type in the placeholders to add text, or click an icon to add a table, chart, SmartArt graphic, picture or multimedia file. To add or remove bullet points from text, just click the Bullets button on the Home tab. If you need more placeholders for titles, content or body text, just make a copy of what you need and drag it into place. PowerPoint’s Smart Guides will help you align it with everything else. Want to use your own pictures instead of ours? No problem! Just right-click a picture and choose Change Picture. Maintain the proportion of pictures as you resize by dragging a corner. References http://www.ncpc.org/topics/intellectual-property- theft/pirated-products http://www.google.com/patents/US8641525 http://kotaku.com/5988244/bootleggers-explain-why- theres-so-much-video-game-piracy-in-china http://www.wipo.int/wipo_magazine/en/2014/04/arti cle_0006.html