[Sound of video game consoles closing]
[Electronic video game-style music]
Each year, the World Intellectual Property Organization celebrates World IP Day all around the world.
This is a celebration of the creativity and innovation happening across the globe,
and the intellectual property system that protects the creations of authors and
inventors and their investment in producing the quality goods and services on which consumers
can rely. As World IP day approached, we at the USPTO
thought a lot about digital creativity and IP. And while there are so many forms of digital
creativity, we focused on one that captured our imagination - video games - since they incorporate so many types of IP.
So the video we decided to do for this year's
world IP day is a take-off of our theme, which is "Digital Creativity." And we decided
to focus on video games. So in talking about how we could promote, market the
piece, we thought- "Hey, let's do an animation, a short 30-second one that we could
put up on social media, and make it look like an old video game."
When we were thinking of doing a video game, we obviously wanted to harken back to the original video games
that we all remember from when we were kids. So the 8-bit look was what we were going for.
I think we got a good mix of, you know, being
able to see what it is visually and also have that 8-bit look. And I think it's really
going to remind people of their favorite video games from when they were young.
Ralph Baer, he's really considered by most to be the father of the original video game.
He was the first one that took the concept of taking a game and applying it to something
that -- back in the late 60s, early 70s -- most people had in their home: the television set.
Before that, game were board games, Monopoly, things of that nature but he really took
it a step farther. He said, "Hey, you know what, people have this TV at home.
Wouldn't it be great if we created an environment where everyone could sit down, the family, children,
and kind of immerse themselves into a new world?"
Make a game, not just by moving pieces around on a board, but something they can take and
sit around the TV and play this game, and immerse themselves in a new reality, a new world.
At the time that Pac-Man was released in the
American arcade environment, most of the games were about war -- Missile Command, Asteroid,
Space Invaders. It was this attack and military-themed sort of games that were there. So here comes
this brightly colored, you know, Pac-Man character who comes into this arcade and it's brightly
colored and all of a sudden, you have women coming into arcades, all of the sudden you
have children coming into arcades. You had character based games that then saw
the creation of all sorts of games that were similar: Mappy and Pengo and all these
sorts of games followed because artist now understood it was ok to create these games
with mascots. And so each one of those games changed the industry, and the society in which
they were introduced. And it changed sociologically the makeup of arcades, which were predominantly
male, predominantly aggressive sorts of games.
There's a lot of time and effort and creativity
involved in designing, producing and distributing a video game. There are the code behind the
game, there's the music -- you'll get separate musicians who will compose the music,
you'll get artists and designers who will create the box art and the labeling.
So there's a lot of time and effort that's put into that and you want to be able to reward the
people for their creativity. They've created something new and novel and exciting.
So, intellectual property is an extremely important way where we can protect those rights
of the people who create, and so they're continued to be inspired to make more,
and to profit from what they've worked so hard for.
At the USPTO we have registered millions of trademarks from foreign and domestic applicants
over the years. Video game companies like Nintendo and Tecmo have registered their company
names as trademarks for video game programs and cartridges back in the early 1990s. More
recently, many video game companies are registering marks to be used to identify online gaming
platforms as both companies and gaming evolves into new and innovative ways.
I think one thing that's helped me out in my career from playing video games is learning
how to fail safety and successfully. I think today we're so immersed in wanting
to get things right the first time and not giving ourselves a chance to fail.
Any innovator will tell you that failure is critical to innovation. Recovering and learning
from failure is often what leads to new ideas and new inventions.
Well in video games you have that change to fail, and go back and problem solve, because
you want to solve that puzzle, you want to beat that level, you want to get that you
know that sword that at the end of the tunnel.
So video games provide us with a safe place to problem solve, and eventually succeed.
The digital age has changed how we make and create, how we collaborate, even how we entertain
ourselves. Increasingly, we can access content from creators
across the world wherever, whenever and however we want. But with that increased access comes
challenges for creators and innovators to retain the benefits of their investment in
time and energy to create goods and services that entertain us all.
This year's World IP Day explores some of the issues surrounding our increasingly digital culture.
After going behind the scenes with the makers and creators at the USPTO,
and hearing from those involved in protecting the intellectual property related to video
games we hope you learned a bit about the intellectual property system that protects
artists and creative industries in our digital world so that they can keep on creating.