Copyright Office Circular 61 should introduce you to the issues surrounding registering the U.S. copyright in your computer program. Here are some suggestions to run by an attorney or a non-attorney document preparer:
Amount of identifying matter in Form TX
Assembly language source code tends to be more narrow than (say) C source, and you may want to defend your registration against allegations that you padded the identifying portions with blank space to make it fill more pages. For the avoidance of doubt, consider pasting the source code into a two-column format using OpenOffice.org or the like. And don't forget to include a copy of the user manual as part of your deposit.
"First" and "last" in Form TX
If your program is longer than 50 pages, you can submit the first 25 and last 25 pages of your program. Trouble is that computer programs in the structured paradigm rarely have a distinct "beginning" or "end"; they're structured as a
call graph. A call graph is a directed
graph, with nodes representing subroutines and edges representing JSRs. Luckily, a program without a lot of complicated recursion will result in a largely acyclic graph, and one common operation you can do on a directed acyclic graph is a
topological sort. Perform this on subroutines based on where they appear in the call graph, you end up with high-level code at one end and low-level code at the other. So you'll probably want to put the init code, main loop, and similarly high-level code as the "first" 25 pages, and your more low-level code (e.g. map decoding and blitting) into the "last" 25 pages.
Which form?
The Copyright Office form for most computer programs is Form TX. But if pictorial or graphic authorship dominates the work, as is usually the case in video games, you want Form PA. If you do file form PA, read over
Copyright Office Circular 55 and
Copyright Office Circular 45 to see what's involved in a PA filing.
The statement of authorship for a video game is usually "Printed text and artwork, text of computer program, and audiovisual work". You'll probably have to include at least the following in your submission to the Copyright Office:
- the printed box,
- the user manual,
- the cartridge or CD-ROM containing object code,
- a DVD containing a video walkthrough of your game,
- a printed text description of the walkthrough, and
- printed identifying materials for the program, as for Form TX above.