To what extent can you use locations, businesses, etc. from the real world in fiction? I know someone cannot copyright a city, but what about a particular location in the city that's private. Can I talk about the Denver Convention Center and use the actual building layout in a novel? Can I use a particular business, say Hacienda Colorado, in a book?
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Use of trademarked names in fiction does not violate intellectual property laws. There are a couple of things to be wary of nonetheless. Be careful with the light in which you depict real businesses. As explained here, if you have a character die from a bad hamburger at Burger King or hurt himself because of a defective pair of Reeboks, then prepare for a libel suit. Similarly, as discussed here, don't turn a trademarked brand name into a verb or a non-proper noun (which lawyers call trademark dilution). In other words, don't have characters "hoovering the living room," "drinking a coke," or "googling their names." Instead, make sure they're "vacuuming the living room with Hoover's wonderful appliance," "enjoying a Coca-Cola," or "performing a search on their names using that awesome Google." Or better yet, stick to vacuum cleaner, soft drink, and search engine. :) As long as the portrayal is innocuous, and brand names are capitalized and not "genericized," there is no harm and no need for any kind of acknowledgment. |
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In fiction writing, it is common place to use real life businesses and location. It's also becoming common place to include a section in books that tells the reader who owns the trademark to those businesses. If you don't acknowledge trademarks, you can open yourself to lawsuits from businesses who are trying to protect their trademarks. If a business doesn't protect their trademark, they can lose it. Also, if you're using real life businesses or people - be very careful what you say. If you say negative things about them or untrue things, you can open yourself up to libel lawsuits as well. (The bigger the company, the bigger the legal department they have.) |
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Another technique, specifically for fiction, not mentioned above is to create a fake brand from the ground up. A perfect example is Toy Story's "Pizza Planet." It clearly paints a picture reminiscent of Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza and just kid-laden arcades in general. But it does so by creating something unique, rather than just changing/genericizing the name of something that already exists. Though, if it is a rather different / hodgepodge concept, it may take up a lot of page-time (as Pizza Planet did) fleshing out its intricacies. So make sure its importance in the story is directly proportionate to its complexity/difference from what the reader is familiar with. |
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I'm writing a fiction FBI crime novel and it includes diamond smuggling between countries, are you allowed to use real presidents/prime ministers names in fiction? what can I include and not include? I have been using fictionious names for the time-being. |
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