Hey, so it’s recently come to my attention that it may be problematic if a hosted game has a reference/mentions something in real world media, and that that may stop it from being published by HG. Is that the case? I was always under the impression that the mension of the title of a piece of work was fine, just as long as you didn’t take any content from said work. Would like an in depth answer on this as I can’t even remember if I mention things in actual media in my WiP or not or if I should be avoiding doing so.
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You should be fine to reference it, I would think. If it’s a major story element it could become dicey, but passing mentions aren’t going to matter to anyone.
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Titles can’t be copyrighted, but they can be trademarked. Even then, mentioning a trademarked title isn’t, in itself, trademark infringement unless you imply ownership over the trademark through your writing. (That said, portraying the trademark in a negative or defamatory manner is one way to get in trouble, even if it’s not strictly trademark infringement.)
That said, the safest legal thing to do would be to just invent your own brand names for your own game’s universe.
For the record, my game had achievements which were largely pop culture and popular media references, but I looked up the achievement titles I wanted for existing trademarks first. Even then, I was using it in the context of parody, which could be considered fair use.
As for whether HG has any specific policies beyond that, I’m not sure.
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Your impression was 100% correct. Making reference to a published work is fine. Lifting text, dialogue, characters, or plot beats from it is not.
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Thank you for the answer! A bit of a follow-up question, if we have a character say something along the lines of:
“Like Shinedown says in their song A Symptom of Being Human, ‘This all seems so familiar, but it doesn’t feel like home… it’s just another unknown’. Nothing feels the same since they’ve been gone.”
If we were to quote it properly, would that be a viable option? I don’t have that example in my game or anything, but I know in academic papers citing things is always important, but you can pull text or quotes if you do cite it properly. I’m not well versed in fiction writing, so I’m not sure if it’s a similar rule for that or not.
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If the quote is very brief and you give attribution, it’s ok, but it should be used sparingly. If in doubt, it’s better to err on the side of avoiding it.
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Understood, I appreciate the clarifications! Makes me feel a lot better to know where the line is for potential dialogue and whatnot. And I agree, definitely wouldn’t be more than one or two in the entire book, if I quote anything at all. It also helps give an idea of how to structure the dance number. Sometimes in works I write just for me, I describe them via posting the text of the part of the song, then posting the action the character does for that part. However I will definitely not being doing that and keep it more to things like, “Once the first line of the song hits, so-and-so does blah-blah. When the chorus kicks in, the do a backflip and land in a split.”
Very insightful stuff!
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Songs are short; fair use of music lyrics can’t work quite the same way as quoting from longer texts.
In my narrative nonfiction book about working in Afghanistan, I wanted to quote a stanza from Johnny Cash’s “Man in Black,” which I heard real-world literally for the first time just after my colleagues had been murdered, and whose lyrics hit me like a ton of bricks.
The publisher was worried that the music company might make them pay for the rights.
In the end, I changed my draft to write about “Johnny Cash in the background, singing about the thousands who had died in the belief we were on their side” – referring to the lyrics without outright reproducing them – and the publisher was satisfied.
But they might not have been if it had been fiction, and I’d been quoting Cash because it was an apt sentiment, rather than because it was reportage of something that had really happened. I don’t know. Glad we have some guidance from K.L. on how CoG regards it.
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Stephen King loves to quote song lyrics. If you look in just about anything he’s written, there’s a list of permissions. Often he quotes only a line or two of a song, but he has to get permission from the copyright holder anyway.
There are a couple of exceptions: you can parody song lyrics, and that’s totally legal. Also, you can use the title of a song without permission, even if that title also happens to be a lyric from the song.
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I know COG has weighed in but citing in academic papers is a bit of a different kettle or fish to commercial books and games. There’s grey areas under fair use which can allow things to be used if cited, but it becomes a lot harder to justify outside of things like education, parody, news etc if someone were to make a complaint. You’ve got to be REALLY careful with short works like quotes and song lyrics as the % of the work you are quoting can quickly become significant (compared to say a book of 200+ pages) and tip into potential danger territory for copyright infringement if someone were to ever decide to complain. Anything in the public domain is fair game to quote (and what I usually use if I want any quotes in my games to be safe). I’ve found this article to be helpful.
The one about fair use is also worth looking at:
Trademarks are a different thing. My understanding is you can use trademarks in a book as long as you don’t imply anything about them that may be untrue or cause damage to the company’s reputation. For example if you had your characters grab some cans of coke to drink that might be fine, but if they all get poisoned from poor maintenance back at the coca cola plant then maybe not so much. In the link below there’s an example about mercedes objecting to the way their cars were presented in a film so they had to digitally remove the logos.
By the way, using “close but not quite” names subbed in is apparently ok.
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