In my game you can run around a city, the shop fronts are all photos of shops in my town - so that's woolworths and other well known brands. As these shops aren't part of the gameplay but simply part of the background scenery can I use these or will I have to create my own shops? cheers Ade

Ethically or law wise you are breaking copyright because of the registered trademark, however depending on the size of your game and nature (free/opensource/shareware/commercial) it could be practical.


For example if you are just creating your own game that you are not going to sell and simply putting it on your website, I cannot imagine anyone giving you any problems.

Ofcourse, some extremist from woolworths might find your game and raise an issue. At most they will probably ask you to remove it.

Does anyone feel we need an FAQ-update on this type of topics? Seems like a godly portion of the questions comming into the Biz forum consists of:

Q: Can I use [copyrighted object X] in my game?
A: No, it belongs to company [XCorp], and they take this serious.
A2: But, we are not lawyers... go consult a lawyer.

Surely we can put this in a FAQ somewhere and just post a link to it when the question arrives. I'd also love to see if we can't get some friendly lawyer to chip in on this in-depth (full rules, possible exceptions, what is NOT covered by Copyright, what is fair use, etc), so every newbie that gets the bright idea of using Coke-bottles for health-packs doesn't have to invest 500USD in legal fees to be told "No".

Allan

I agree, it's such a common question and is likely to be asked at least several times a month as someone new uses a new texture of a company logo or item.

If you have enough resources, and you plan to sell this game, what you might want to consider is actually grabbing a lawyer and seeing if you can sell "ad space" to the stores in your game. We're also currently looking into this for a game we're doing because we want the city to feel real.

But yeah, if you put a Walmart in your game, and then Walmart decides you're infringing, even if you're not making money, it could be problems. You could get away with Wally Mart, Mallgreens or Spears, most likely.

Quote: Original post by __ODIN__ (Allan)
Does anyone feel we need an FAQ-update on this type of topics? Seems like a godly portion of the questions comming into the Biz forum consists of:

Q: Can I use [copyrighted object X] in my game?
A: No, it belongs to company [XCorp], and they take this serious.
A2: But, we are not lawyers... go consult a lawyer.

Surely we can put this in a FAQ somewhere and just post a link to it when the question arrives.

There's one on my site - http://www.sloperama.com/advice/faq61.htm. "So You Wanna Copy Somebody's IP." The particular question being asked in this thread isn't exactly covered, but I can add it one of these days...
Tom

Quote: Original post by ade-the-heat
In my game you can run around a city, the shop fronts are all photos of shops in my town - so that's woolworths and other well known brands.
As these shops aren't part of the gameplay but simply part of the background scenery can I use these or will I have to create my own shops?

The short answer is yes you will. The logos of these companies are registered trademarks and you can't use them in your game without the companies permission.

The concept of "selling ad space" to these companies so that their shops and logos appear would be a good one except that with companies of that size you would need to prove that hundreds of thousands of people will see their "ad" otherwise it won't be of interest.

Quote: Original post by dawidjoubert
Ethically or law wise you are breaking copyright because of the registered trademark...

Copyright and Trademarks are two different things so you can't breach copyright by making use of a Trademark. Breach of copyright is the unauthorised use/copying of copyright material, while Trademark infringement is the unauthorised use of a Trademark (or in some cases the use of a mark so similar that it would confuse customers).

[Edited by - Obscure on May 5, 2006 7:51:51 AM]