Atari’s 1980 Copyright Registration: A Turning Point for Video Game Intellectual Property

On June 17, 1980, Atari registered copyrights for the games Asteroids and Lunar Lander. Today that may sound like a routine legal formality, but at the time it was something unusual for the entire video game industry.

In the late 1970s, computer and video games were often seen more as electronic devices or collections of circuits than as creative works in their own right. Manufacturers protected arcade cabinets, trademarks, and hardware designs, but rarely sought copyright protection for the games themselves.

Atari was one of the first companies to argue that a game’s source code, graphics, gameplay, and other creative elements deserved the same legal protection as a book, film, or piece of music. The registration of Asteroids helped establish that video games could be treated as independent works of intellectual property.

The timing was important. The arcade industry was growing rapidly, and successful games were regularly copied by competitors. Without clear legal protection, it was difficult to challenge clones that often appeared just weeks after a hit game’s release. Copying games was becoming easier as more of their functionality moved into software rather than hardware, which was far more expensive and difficult to reproduce.

Atari’s decision helped lay the legal foundation for the modern video game industry. Throughout the 1980s, publishers increasingly relied on copyright law to protect their games, and lawsuits over game cloning became common.

Today, the idea that a video game can be protected by copyright seems obvious. In the summer of 1980, however, it was still a new and largely untested concept. Atari helped transform video games from a technological novelty into a recognized form of software and digital creativity.

See also The Birth of Video Games: How Atari Changed Gaming Forever.