i dunno about games, but there IS an issue in turbosquid when publishing guns by some manufacturers, and they force you to use a different licensing thingy (cant remember how its called) which basically says that the product may not be the same with the actual gun...
I'm surprised it's so loose. But then do they have to license them in movies? I can see the grey area is quite wide in this respect. I was thinking of switching from fantasy RPG to something a little easier like a sci-fi shooter. No character charts, massive inventories, save games... all that fun stuff that UDK makes so easy
I was looking at the KSG and it got me thinking. But stylized it probably the way to go just to be on the safe side.
Firearms licensing is a hugely complicated area because many currently produced designs are variants or derivatives of designs that are more than a century old, while others are almost entirely new.
There is a reason small arms manufacturers (at least within the US legal system) do not have the same kind of design and patent litigation activity profile as tech firms like Apple, Samsung, etc, and that is largely because small arms design is so completely muddled in terms of "who invented what" that they could literally spend every cent of their revenue on legal fees and end up with no clear answer.
The fact that many predominant firearm designs were partially or wholly created by various government entities over the past century - some that don't even exist anymore, a number of which were destroyed in war - just complicates things further. A few examples...
- the MG42 was designed by state agencies of the Third Reich. The Third Reich, thank God, no longer exists. The MG42 is still produced today in a form as the MG3 (in a slightly different caliber). You try and figure out exactly who "owns" that design. I doubt anybody is going to file lawsuits on behalf of Albert Speer or his subordinates at the Nazi Armaments Department for selling a game with an MG42 model in it.
- John Browning's design of the M1911 is one of the most popular pistols in the US today, but the actual design was commissioned by the US government and the patents have expired over the last 100 years. It has been produced by hundreds of companies and several government arsenals over the last 102 years. Somebody with a really, really distinctive version of it might try and argue trade dress infringement, but it's going to be a long shot.
- the AR-15 / M-16 family of rifles was originally produced by Armalite, then sold to Colt, then rights got jumbled around because of the vagaries of government production contracts, and now FN Herstal produces one type for the US Army while Colt Canada produces it for the Canadian .mil, and Colt produces the M4 carbine version for the US .mil (although that is in the process of changing). However... Eugene Stoner's original patents on the AR rifle have expired, and the basic design is now public domain.
If you can find a lawyer who is both intimately familiar with the modern firearms landscape in the US and who does business law (good luck with that), their advice is probably worth every penny. But the short version from somebody who is NOT a lawyer is that you probably don't need to worry unless you're making something extremely unique and portraying it in a horribly negative light. I wouldn't, for example, make a game about the ugly side of the Soviet Union's purges and then make a big deal about the fact that Blokhin (spit) specifically used a box of Walther pistols to single-handedly murder 7,000 of Stalin's enemies in the span of a few days. That would probably provoke Carl Walther GmbH to come after you.
This is something I'd like to know about, too. I'm far from the only one who would have any interest in using realistic firearms in several videogames. Be they the designs themselves and/or the actual names.
But to make matters worse, I'm far from a weapons expert, let alone well-versed in the legality behind it all. I am familiar with some name switching in this area involving the real-life Walther PPK being used in 007 works under the name "P2K Wolfram".
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For example when Valve picked up counterstrike they renamed all of the weapons but the models are still the same as ever.
I was looking at the KSG and it got me thinking. But stylized it probably the way to go just to be on the safe side.
There is a reason small arms manufacturers (at least within the US legal system) do not have the same kind of design and patent litigation activity profile as tech firms like Apple, Samsung, etc, and that is largely because small arms design is so completely muddled in terms of "who invented what" that they could literally spend every cent of their revenue on legal fees and end up with no clear answer.
The fact that many predominant firearm designs were partially or wholly created by various government entities over the past century - some that don't even exist anymore, a number of which were destroyed in war - just complicates things further. A few examples...
- the MG42 was designed by state agencies of the Third Reich. The Third Reich, thank God, no longer exists. The MG42 is still produced today in a form as the MG3 (in a slightly different caliber). You try and figure out exactly who "owns" that design. I doubt anybody is going to file lawsuits on behalf of Albert Speer or his subordinates at the Nazi Armaments Department for selling a game with an MG42 model in it.
- John Browning's design of the M1911 is one of the most popular pistols in the US today, but the actual design was commissioned by the US government and the patents have expired over the last 100 years. It has been produced by hundreds of companies and several government arsenals over the last 102 years. Somebody with a really, really distinctive version of it might try and argue trade dress infringement, but it's going to be a long shot.
- the AR-15 / M-16 family of rifles was originally produced by Armalite, then sold to Colt, then rights got jumbled around because of the vagaries of government production contracts, and now FN Herstal produces one type for the US Army while Colt Canada produces it for the Canadian .mil, and Colt produces the M4 carbine version for the US .mil (although that is in the process of changing). However... Eugene Stoner's original patents on the AR rifle have expired, and the basic design is now public domain.
If you can find a lawyer who is both intimately familiar with the modern firearms landscape in the US and who does business law (good luck with that), their advice is probably worth every penny. But the short version from somebody who is NOT a lawyer is that you probably don't need to worry unless you're making something extremely unique and portraying it in a horribly negative light. I wouldn't, for example, make a game about the ugly side of the Soviet Union's purges and then make a big deal about the fact that Blokhin (spit) specifically used a box of Walther pistols to single-handedly murder 7,000 of Stalin's enemies in the span of a few days. That would probably provoke Carl Walther GmbH to come after you.
But to make matters worse, I'm far from a weapons expert, let alone well-versed in the legality behind it all. I am familiar with some name switching in this area involving the real-life Walther PPK being used in 007 works under the name "P2K Wolfram".