Is It Legal to Use Military Insignias of Defunct Nations?
I'm writing a novel, and the plotline has military terminology and insignias. The basic plot is that there are two continents in my world: one capitalist and allegorically like the US and NATO, and the other communist and allegorically like the former USSR.
Is it legal for me to use the old military insignias of the USSR for my story for the communist continent's military? Or is it best to steer clear of that?
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Under US copyright law, anything created by the US government is not protected by copyright. It is automatically public domain. (There are some complexities to this that we could get into but they're not relevant here.) But it doesn't necessarily follow that every other country in the world has the same laws.
In the case of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union no longer exists, so it's not clear who would sue you for infringement! In any case, current Russian law specifically excludes the text of laws and government symbols from copyright protection. So you could freely copy contemporary Russian military insignia. Even if Russia considered itself to have inherited documents and symbols from the Soviet Union, they would presumably fall under the same exemption.
As Cyn says, if you are creating a fictional country, you probably don't want to copy too much from a real country, as that could quickly become distracting and out of place. If I saw a movie based on Lord of the Rings and the hobbits had American flags flying over their village, my first thought would be that there was supposed to be some connection between the fictional hobbit nation and the United States, that they were eventually going to reveal that this place was founded by inter-dimensional travelers from the US or something. And if no such connection was ever introduced, I'd think the producers were either really messed up or were trying to make some kind of point.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/42682. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Legal and wise are not the same thing.
Legally I believe you're in the clear. There is no trademark on government symbols.
But if you use the actual symbols from the USSR, you are writing yourself into a corner. Readers who recognize them will expect that your country is in fact the USSR, even if it has a different name.
You are better off making a few changes. It will be obvious to most readers that your novel is about two superpowers similar to superpowers of the recent past. And that's okay. You have more freedom though if you break away from the absolutes. Use a different animal where one country uses animals. Or use a plant or natural formation instead of an animal. Change up the colors. Change the number of stripes, or make stripes into concentric circles.
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Almost always it is legally fine. There is one major exception: Nazi symbology is banned in quite a few countries. And there are isolated examples of other symbols banned in individual countries, but those aren't commonly used or well known symbols (generally result of local strife, so symbols of local terrorist groups, etc.).
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