Using Names for Weaponry used in Actual Games
I've recently looked at the chat that talks about the question of referencing actual military weapons in your writing. Since I'm writing a science-fiction novel, that's not too big of a problem for me; however, this causes me to raise a question: how does this apply to weapons from video games? For instance, Pixonic's game War Robots has some weapon names that I would like to use in the novel, as some of the things in the book have weapons with the same function.
Is it safe to include the names of these weapons (like Zenit or Molot) to correspond to the guns, or do I have to come up with another, original name and reference it to have a similar function to the actual in-game weapon? As of now, I'm assuming I can use the name because I'm clearly stating in my novel that the designers in the story gave it the name because they were lazy and decided to use the name featured in the actual game that uses it. In that case, I will tell where the original name came from.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/29945. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
I am not a lawyer, but No, you shouldn't use them.
A unique invented name is copyrighted, and no in-story justification matters. The owners of the copyright have all the rights to make a profit using that name; if you sell your story they may be entitled to all the profits and damages and court costs on top of that.
You can't open a burger joint and call it McDonald's and say you just got lazy and this seemed like a very popular name for a burger joint.
That is what you are doing in your story, as an author, being lazy and stealing somebody else's work of imagination and trying to make money with it. Whatever your characters say won't matter in the least, just like it doesn't matter if your characters break the law and kill and murder people. They aren't real. They can steal. You cannot.
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