How entertaining is playing a game? Gordon P. Firemark offers some thoughts, in his post Asked and Answered: Protection for a game, on the various legal strategies (such as copyright and trade-marks) available for protecting games. For an academic treatment of whether games can be the subject of copyright protection under US law, Bruce Boyden offers this post, and also a paper (entitled “Games and Other Uncopyrightable Systems”) which has been uploaded to SSRN (the issue is a live one in the US because of Section 102(b) of the US Copyright Act., which limits copyright protection for “systems”).
For those who are really interested in the topic, also well-worth checking out are Boyden’s comprehensive four-part series of posts (1, 2, 3, 4 plus this supplemental post) exploring the issue of games and copyright, using the Scrabulous (now Lexulous) litigation as a starting point.