Hi all,

In this thread, I got the advice to register my upcoming game as a brand:

http://www.gamedev.net/topic/660118-own-ruleset-how-likely-do-i-violate-others/

This reminded me to the following matter:

I'm going to open a website soon, which will present my upcoming game. There will be names in it (world, cities, areas, characters, historical names etc.), all are unique, all of them was made up by me. Some months later, the game will be released.

If someone just copies all that, starts using all those names in another game (i.e. he purely steals all of it, perhaps a big company), then I guess I cannot really do much as an indie developer. (No hundreds of thousands of dollars to sue, and the stolen content wasn't even protected by additional measures, only by "default" copyright I guess.)

What I feel a bigger problem is the following: what if they steal it, protect it, and then I will get sued for using "their" content? Is there a way to prove it in the court that they appeared first time on my webpage? (Again, all the names and the whole world are unique. It took very long time to make up these great-sounding, yet nowhere-ever used fantasy names.)

Maybe all this is theoretical, and such thefts are not common?

P.S.: and yes, I know I might get the answer "probably your work is not so good that anyone wants to steal it", and "there is a bigger chance the game will fail, as 90% of games", but please, let's disregard this.

what if they steal it, protect it, and then I will get sued for using "their" content? Is there a way to prove it in the court that they appeared first time on my webpage?

Document everything. Keep emails, collaborator agreements, purchase receipts... your files are dated, and when you uploaded them to your wiki or version control is also documented.
Just be able to prove when you created what.