‘New Media Rights’ Look To The Community To Continue Helping The Small Guy

New Media Rights are currently running a funding campaign but why is this important you ask? When developing a new game or setting up a new studio not many developers will put much consideration into the legal side of their new venture. However with intellectual property law forever getting more complex it’s often impossible to know if you are in the right or not.

Little is more devastating than spending months of your time on a project only to get it pulled by a huge multinational on some very weak grounds. And when does a project start to infringe on Copyright?

The lines are very blurred and with multinationals having an army of lawyers able to claim you are in the wrong, can you really dispute it. The most high profile example of this was the whole Mojang Bethesda debate over Scrolls. A very weak lawsuit to say the least, but if that was directed at a new two person startup would you know how to pursuit it and more importantly win?

In reality indie developers and entrepreneurs in general don’t have resources to fight these cases or even get council due to lawyers not coming cheap. Luckily there is some hope.

New Media Rights is a non-profit organisation who has existed since 2007 and has so far managed to help over 500 individuals. Settling all manner of legal issues incurred offering free legal advice to help the little guy.

New Media Rights however have not just been helping individuals they have also been working to uphold civil liberties across the internet. Working  and successfully fighting against SOPA they uphold the rights, your rights that are all to often taken for granted.

Alongside the legal portion New Media Rights also educate indie developers on the ins and outs of the law with their LAGD (Legal Assistance For Game Developers ) series. This series covers Trademarks, contractors and non-disclosure agreements so far but the team hope to make more with your help.

Of course being an organization that distributes so much to the wider community for free they do rely on the community to help them out when possible. It is on this notion that New Media Rights have started a crowd-funding campaign via IndieGoGo.

New Media Rights are looking for a little extra funding to allow them to continue to provide all of these amazing services to the world. The money will go to producing a second series of LAGD videos and help keep New Media Rights producing more high quality videos overall, along with keeping the legal department open.

New Media Rights really are offering an amazing service that is becoming increasingly more important in the world we live in. I urge you all to head over to their IndieGoGo page here and check out some more of the details and consider contrabuting.

If you are interested in the great work this company does check out their official site newmediarights.org here and their YouTube channel here where you can find all manner of great advice and interviews.