Is it okay to mention Daz Studio in fiction?
Sfariah D
Posts: 25,703
in The Commons
is it okay to mention Daz Studio and Genesis 8 in a fictional story? I want at least one of my characters to play Daz studio. One of the characters got her boyfriend created as a 3D character based on G8M. Is that okay?
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Comments
Daz Studio isn't a game, so they can't play it. Use it maybe, but not play it.
Oops wrong term. The characters use Daz Studio to create their 3D scenes and 2D renders. Is that okay?
Yeah
I would think you’re safe enough, as long as you’re not portraying the software in a negative light, as that might be construed as defamatory. (And now I’m imagining all kinds of crazy Daz-related plots... LOL)
If your work becomes a huge hit you can sell product placement rights to Daz.
I think they would likely only take issue if it is shown being used to create porn
I do not write pornagraphic stories or create porn comics. I am not sure why I have the anatomical elements because I feel like I cannot use them.
This is more a trademark issue than anything, and if you look at fiction in general authors very rarely use real brands, except for passing references in scene dressing perhaps.
So they go to Starbucks but not work there?
They probably go to Junior's, or buy their takeaway from Cluck-in-a-Bucket, to be safe.
Not that I should be chiming in, but who really would care?
The emotional impact would ONLY be from Daz users and they would already see it as surfacy-tug-gimmick....
and really wouldn't be moved. much....
More clever would be to use an obscure reference that ONLY a Daz user would know- that would get you points...
so you can mention an operation or task they were doing...even sitting back and watching a render in a 3D modelling program.
Just something below the surface that hits the insider soft spot.
Part of it, I think, is not only product placements but market overlaps. A lot of writers also dabble in art, and vise versa (the best Robin Hood book I remember from childhood was written and illustrated by one of N. C. Wyeth's art teachers, Howard Pyle), including DazStudio these days. Both media channels are explicitly used for storytelling, sometimes concurrently (an author I follow uses DS for her book covers, and a lot of Baen covers and other publishers have recognizable renders on them (not only the "Uncanny-Valley Motel" look that most all 3D has when you've seen enough of it, but the "that's Victoria 3 with an AprilYSH hair and the old Millenium Dragon!" kind of recognizable), with or without postwork filters. The other extreme is nearly identical brand-names for completely different businesses: Sprint cellular service is in no known way affiliated with Sprint Foods convenience stores and gas stations.
Even when you don't portray a product in a negative light, companies typically won't just let you mention their product, because they reason that the product's good name will cast a halo of desireability upon your work of fiction.
Also, the lay-person won't know DAZ studio from Adam, so it's best to use a fictional software company that sounds big (I usually name it after a fruit, because any fruit named company is obviously a near trillion dollar tech empire) and a program name that describes what it does: We struggled to create the characters using Banana's "People Maker 6.0" and finally got them to move naturally.
If you want something that DAZ Studio fans will recognize and cheer, make a fictitious software company, three capital letters with a Z, like "ZAP Foundary" or "ZIP Works".
On the other hand, there have been plenty of instances I've seen of real life companies mentioned in mundane context within TV shows. I remember an episode of Torchwood for instance where they mentioned something having been ordered from eBay and even showed a (replica) eBay page with the character's item on it. There was also an episode of NCIS that explicetly mentioned someone had placed all their stuff up on eBay. Sometimes you DO have to mention RL product names in a book or a TV show.
edited to add:
There is also a factor that, somewhere along the line, trying to INVENT a fictionalised stand-in replacement for every cotton pickin' product or service out there runs into a law of diminishing returns and becomes pointless. There are too many products that are simply part of our lives, like it or not, and trying to obfuscate them all starts getting silly. Mainly, they obfuscate the name if they want to do something WITH the particular company such that they need more control over what might happen in-story concerning that company that might in itself have the real life company go off in the opposite direction in real life, or something. This is probably as much the reason you'll see the fictional GNN show up in a lot of TV shows and movies as a stand in for CNN. It isn't so much that they think CNN might go after them for telling fiction about their network as that they went to insert THEIR newscaster characters and stories into the fictional world's news broadcasts, and the show runners have NO control over what CNN might do in real life that might fly in the face of what the TV show is doing wrt their story arc. Also, CNN might bring with it excess baggage that the show writers don't want to deal with. I.e,. CNN's political views might clash a little... or a LOT... with the show's, or something.
eBay may well have cooperated with that - product placement. I know that newspapers and magazines will allow, and even produce, dummy issues showing a story required for a film or TV series.
I initially thought, "I want at least one of my characters to play Daz studio," meant that you would have a character named, "Daz Studio."
There were a LOT of other-people's-stuff mentioned in READY PLAYER ONE, and I doubt the author went out and got permission to insert all those things into his story.
Call it DAZE Studio.
I think you would be surprised. A big AAA movie is going to cover every single base. If they did not get permission to use something outright, then they may reference it vaguely in a way that does not technically cross the line. They keep a full legal team just for this stuff.
Sometimes you might see foreign studios cross the lines a bit, but even that has slacked off in recent years. "WcDonalds" and variations of it has a long and storied history in dozens of anime, and has appeared in some English productions. The few times it appears with its real name were because it was legally cleared to do so.
Sometimes they get more creative, like MASK*DONALD'S, which is run by a bunch a guys who look like pro wrestlers wearing luchador masks. I can imagine how intimidating it must be to eat there, but few people ever complain!
Even the devil himself worked at MgRonalds.
like most things it's probably ok until it isn't
if you don't have a very big reader base it probably is a moot point but if it's made into a major film they probably either need to get permission or invent a software name
a name probably won't mean much to most readers anyway a description is better, such as "I was using or playing with my 3D modeling software to make a virtual you" etc
The impression I get is that the rules may be very different for prose (textual novels, short stories, etc) than it is for the visual media (movies, TV shows, graphic novels), but I've never really looked into it. I.e. merely mentioning that one is going to McDonalds, that they're drinking a Pepsi, or that they dropped and broke their iPad is pretty commonplace in (prose) novels. One of the more exagerated examples of this is READY PLAYER ONE (the novel), which made extensive mention of a LOT of things that are part of our collective, nostalgic 80s culture, and I don't get the impression the author went out and asked permission for all those referenced TV shows, comicbook things, videogames and their locations, Anime objects, dice-and-paper RPG locations, video game consoles, and so on. He simply sprinkled them willynilly liberally throughout the novel. It was packed to the gills with this stuff, but it was also clear this was "A world filled with fan-made replicas of all these things," it wasn't a case where he'd had, say, some actual Anime character hop into one of Heinlein's irrelivancy-busses from their native universe and wander into the universe the novel was set in, rather, it was a group of characters who'd surrounded themselves with fan-tribute-replica stuff. When the novel was adapted into a movie, though, then they DID need to clear all that stuff, and in many cases they wound up replacing them with something else that served the same purpose in the plot, or they wound up dropping a lot of them out altogether for brevity.
So, really, I guess it depends on if you're doing a graphic-novel or you're doing a prose novel, say.
LoL Junior’s is chain in Brooklyn known for their cheesecakes and desserts. ????????
I may be misremembering its name, I was thinking of the place (which frequently suffers) in Kim Harrison's hollows books.
If anybody has objections, You could still go the IBM -> HAL way... So it's not "DAZ", it's "EBA" and not "Genesis #" but "Genetic #" (Or "Generic Male/Female #"
)
I don’t know where all those question marks came from lol.
Understood Richard it was never taken as such.
It just struck me as it was just yesterday somebody made mention of Junior’s. :)
As an avid reader I have to disagree with the couple people who said that name brand products don't get mentioned in books; it is incredibly common. A quick browse through the books on my coffee table found that 100% of them (based on my sample size of five books that I checked, which is obviously statistically significant
) mention a known brand by name in the first chapter.
That said, I also agree with Wiz, that it's probably a better idea to make up your own in-world version of DAZ Studio and use that in your story. Even is DAZ never has a problem with your use, it gives you a lot more flexibility for what you can do with in the story to make one up and use that..
LMAO Devil Is A Part-Timer...god I wish they would make a second season, I really want to know what happens...lol
I'm a writer (and have 5 book covers designed using DS) and I'm always surprised when I see this kind of questions asked as the info is abundant on the net. Yes, you can use product and company names in fiction, but as this article states one has to use common sense re what one says:
http://www.rightsofwriters.com/2010/12/can-i-mention-brand-name-products-in-my.html
Ray Bradbury mentioned Dixon Ticonderoga pencils in "Dandelion Wine", so there is precident...
"He brought out a yellow nickel tablet. He brought out a yellow Ticonderoga pencil. He opened the tablet. He licked the pencil...."