Similarly, if you are really in to resin casting you may already have your own custom board. If you don’t have a Makerbot or RepRap at home, there is nothing to stop you from cutting up some pieces of paper to make your own board and start playing today.
It is worth remembering that this is not a new problem specific to 3D printing. So, Sublime’s pieces do not violate copyright, do not violate patent, and do not violate trademark. Non-commercial use is important when considering fair use in the copyright context, but as discussed above there does not appear to be any copyright violation requiring a fair use analysis. After all, there is no non-commercial exception to patent infringement. That is because I don’t think that it is relevant for this analysis. Sublime does mention Setters of Catan in his description of the pieces, but he does so in order to tell people that these pieces are compatible with the game, not that they are from the company behind the game.Īs you may have noticed, I have not discussed the fact that Sublime’s efforts are non-commercial.
However, that only protects the mark “Settlers of Catan.” As long as no one tries to suggest that the Settlers of Catan company is behind the pieces, there should not be a trademark problem. Settlers of Catan is a registered trademark (although apparently only recently). Even if he had patented the rules, that patent would expire in 2015 at the latest, opening the proverbial floodgates in four short years. In this case, it does not appear that Klaus Teuber patented the rules to Settlers of Catan. You can patent a board game to protect the rules of the game.
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Therefore, in order to protect the free flow of ideas, recipes and game rules are rarely protected by copyright. Copyright protects expressions, not ideas. Game rules, like recipes, have a limited number of ways that they can be expressed. Nor does copyright protect the actual rules of Settlers of Catan. Moreover, Sublime’s pieces are generally more ornate that the official versions.Ĭopyright does not protect the shapes of the tiles (they are designed to fit together, and are therefore most likely “functional objects” outside of the scope of copyright). Copyright might also protect the shapes of the pieces, except these shapes are so generic and utilitarian (rectangles for roads, simple houses for settlements) that any protection would be extremely limited. However, Sublime’s 3D designs make no attempt to copy the images on the tiles. This makes sense – the image on the tile (of pastures, or fields, or rocky quarries, or the like) is just a picture, and pictures are well within the scope of copyright. Instead, copyright protects the design on the game tiles. Importantly, that protection does not cover the entirety of the game. Settlers of Catan is probably protected by copyright.
Etsy catan board download#
Instead, if you want the pieces you need to download the files, boot up your 3D printer, and make them yourself.ĭoes creating these pieces violate any of Klaus Teuber’s intellectual property rights? In order to answer this question, it probably helps to walk through the analysis for each type of intellectual property right (for a more in depth explanation of how all of these rights work, take a look at the PK whitepaper It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology). In fact, the pieces themselves are not even distributed. In contrast, these new 3D printed pieces are not officially licensed. Settlers of Catan has successfully spun off numerous officially licensed expansion packs, card games, and digital versions (you can play on an Xbox360, a Playstation3, various Apple iProducts, and even a Microsoft Surface table). Also, players are rarely out of the running until the very last turn. One of its most attractive features is that, unlike traditional boardgames like Monopoly, a game of Settlers is usually completed in around an hour. It has been heralded by mainstream publications like the Washington Post and generally enjoyed as a fun, easy to learn game. This development raises the question: is this illegal? If it isn’t, should it be?įor the uninitiated, Settlers of Catan is a wildly popular board game created by a German game designer named Klaus Teuber in 1995. Certain corners of the Internet were abuzz this week with the news that a user named Sublime had uploaded design files to Thingiverse that allow people to 3D print pieces to the wildly popular board game Settlers of Catan.
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