No need. Props won’t contain beer or anything else with an alcoholic content. It’s against most insurance policies to drink on set because of the repeated takes. Here’s a good article on what’s typically being used in place of the hard stuff when people are shooting scenes. (That’s not to say no one shows up toasted.)
Hey @Jardine - Yep, that killed me, too! Great bit of evil writing there! I just applaud the absolute snarkiness of singing your product placement. In Kung Pow, they altered an existing jingle and added “product placement” into the lyrics to really drive home the idea that the movie was being interrupted by a commercial.
Sorry, apparently I’m being unclear - I didn’t mean to imply that trademark was designed to protect language, my point was quite the opposite. That the lawsuit was misusing trademark law in an attempt to do that, because they didn’t actually have a legal leg to stand on in this case. But I am saying that the use of a trademarked term, being used to refer to a fictional product, does, in some small way, contribute to trademark erosion. You start to associate the name with other things, it’s heading down the path of not uniquely identifying that product, i.e. it’s a first step towards generic usage.
If EA initiated the lawsuit (presumably as a response to threats by Bell), that makes more sense. The primary issue remains, though - a filmmaker wouldn’t have to license the appearance of Bell helicopters in a movie, so why should a game maker have to? Neither copyright nor trademark law protects the appearance of a Bell helicopter being used in this manner. A helicopter isn’t a work of art and neither EA nor filmmakers are selling helicopters.
That depends on how heavily intertwined Bell helicopters are with the story. How necessary were they to making the game seem “real”?
Some products make only glancing appearances, and their placement benefits both parties. It may be overlooked. However, he more a product appears onscreen, the more central it becomes to the telling of a story, and as TV and radio advertising have begun to lessen in impact, placement within shows and games has become even more important as an advertising tool. (Yes, this sucks.)
The best product placements are the ones where the product is interwoven so well that it is needed for the film’s storyline. For instance, in You’ve Got Mail, AOL is practically a member of the supporting cast; just as Wilson, the volleyball in Castaway, comes to life as Tom Hanks only friend on a deserted island. BMW for instance profits from every James Bond film as he always drives a BMW.
Those product placement demanded renumeration for the product producer, because the story was written to include those specific products for cultural reasons. The same is true of the Bell helicopters and their full placement in the game. They weren’t occasionally seen on posters. They were fully 3-D imaged, and three different aircraft from the company appeared in the one game.
Product placement is really the opposite issue, though - companies paying money for their products to appear in the films. BMW wasn’t being given money by the Bond producers - quite the opposite - and Bond stopped driving a BMW when Ford gave the filmmakers $35 million to have Bond switch to Aston Martins. The Bond movies are quite famous for highly lucrative product placement deals - BMW was one of the companies that contributed to a $100 million product placement package that entirely paid for the production of the 18th Bond film, for example. (There are some films that have made money before even being released thanks to product placement.) Other filmmakers are loath to include real brands because it’s free advertising that erodes the possibility of product placement deals. So it’s the smaller, cheaper films that aren’t going to get product placement anyways that don’t bother with the expense of fake labels, etc. For some perverse reason, apparently because of the precedent set in driving games with auto makers, companies like Bell think the dynamic should be the opposite for games. The fact that some soldier characters are using historically accurate equipment doesn’t mean the makers of that equipment are owed anything, any more than they would have control over references to the equipment in any other type of fiction.
Also, realize that inclusion of a product in some way other than just as background may involve an action that increases legal liability for the product. For example, if the video game shows the helicopters performing a maneuver they can’t actually do.
People do that with cars they sign off on for major appearances.
