Suppose I write fiction that, in one part, involves FOX News delivering a news report about the overthrow/assassination of Erdogan, the president of Turkey. (Any other news network, such as BBC/MSNBC/CNN/NYT, or any other president, such as Merkel, Shinzo Abe, etc. could be substituted for it.) As long as no specific news anchors are mentioned by name (i.e., Wolf Blitzer,) am I staying clear of defamation or infringement territory here?
Legal advice is best suited to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderatro
I don’t necessarily see how this would be defamation as you described it.
Infringement, on the other hand, is tricky. I would start by pointing out the points made, by me & others, in this thread.
To be clear, “infringement” would be usage of the news channel’s trademarked name in the piece–how you handle it would determine what side of line you’re on (relevance to the plot, etc.).
The other issue would be publicity rights, regarding identifying the individuals in question. I’m less familiar with this area of the law, as it’s insanely convoluted.
The general advice is that, if you don’t need to mention the specifics, you shouldn’t. That’s not, of course, to say that you can’t, but it’s just easier overall to not wade into that mudpit if you don’t have to.
The key here is you are writing fiction. How important is it to your story that you identify the trademark of FOX News? If the story can do without that trademark brand, simply create a fictitious.
No. Trademark law protects the holder from other people or companies using the mark in business, not in a work of fiction or other form of art. As long as you’re not starting a news network with a name or logo confusingly similar to Fox’s (or CNN’s, etc.), you are not infringing their trademark.
Disney (to use a prominent example) can sue people for using unauthorized images of their cartoon characters under trademark law because they have obtained trademark protection for a wide range of products (comic books, bed sheets, etc.) that they sell (or plan to sell) and that infringers might attempt to copy. The existence of the unauthorized products can confuse consumers into thinking they are getting genuine Disney products, which hurts Disney’s business.
Having Fox or another real company appear in a novel cannot create the same kind of confusion and is therefore not infringement of Fox’s trademark.
Depending on the nature of your novel, you might also be nominally protected against a copyright suit if you can claim it is a work of satire, which is an explicit exception in the law.
That said, anyone can sue for any reason, and if you really pissed off Rupert Murdock, no doubt his lawyers could throw a claim of trademark infringement into the multi-million-dollar suit they file against you. They might not prevail on principle, but unless you’re a billionaire, too, they could shut you up.
As for the defamation aspect, I’m much less familiar with how that works WRT companies, so I’ll leave that to one of our lawyers here.
You are, of course, correct, with regard to the Trademark thing, which is why I said it was tricky. I will admit that I oversimplified too much. When I said that the usage of the name was the infringement (which I now see could be confusing), I meant, that, since they asked about general infringement, that would be the only place it’d occur & the only type it would be–not that it was actually infringement. Basically I meant that nothing else they described could be construed as infringement of any type. I do apologize for the lack of clarity.
The general is goal is to not get sued, rather than win the suit, since, as you note, the latter is tough with these companies, even if the law is on your side. Ultimately it doesn’t matter if you actually infringe on someone’s Trademark or publicity rights if you draw their negative attention. If anything even smells to them of possible Trademark infringement, they’re obligated to defend against it.
As such, I didn’t draw much of a distinction here between “getting sued for Trademark infringement” and actual Trademark infringement, since, in practice, it doesn’t matter one iota. That’s where relevance to the plot, etc. comes in.
Like I said, I oversimplified, but generally when people ask questions like this, I assume they mean “can doing this cost me everything I have” rather than “is the law actually on my side”. As such, I answered the former. I will admit that I should have made a greater attempt to specify the distinction, but my head was elsewhere, and, as I’ve shown, I’m not the most eloquent in that situation.
“Defamation” would require, among other things, actual defamation. It’s also hard to prove in fiction.