These “effective killers” who livestream their rampages on YouTube are hunting vicious prey like people at the shopping centre, or at worship, or just children at school.
As I understand it, you don’t need a license to depict it, but you can’t use trademarked names/model numbers with out a license/permission. (Unless you’re Escape from Tarkov, in which case, good luck getting Russians to honor a foreign cease and desist).
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Glad to see they’re not coming for any of the Borderlands gun manufacturers yet.
The idea behind trademark law is to avoid confusion on the part of (potential) customers. For example, you don’t get to prepare and market a brown sugary liquid and sell it in roundish bottles under the name of “Coca-Cola” unless you are the actual Coca-Cola company – because customers have a right to expect that a soda that is marketed as “Coca-Cola” is the genuine article and not some cheap knockoff somebody brewed in their own kitchen (or soda factory). In addition, trademarks only go so far – in the 1990s there was no obvious problem with the fact that both Microsoft and Hyundai marketed successful products called “Excel” because one was a piece of software and the other was an automobile, i.e., there was no chance of confusion between the two. Nobody would end up with the spreadsheet application thinking they had in fact bought the Korean car, and vice versa.
It is not entirely clear to me how depicting some gun in a video game would cause trademark confusion among customers since the video game is obviously not in competition with the gun manufacturer. A video game is not something you can take to the shooting range to blast away at paper targets. Also if video games are like movies, then the gun manufacturers should be eager to pay to have their products advertised in the game.
Oh come on. Do some basic googling before posting “oh I don’t know probably”. There have been tons of studies that show violent video games don’t increase violence, many show it reduces it.
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they can take my Portal gun from my cold, dead hands!
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Oh godfuckingdammit now I’m going to have to hear about this every time more than five people are on chat because all people want is to believe that we aren’t a fucked up sick society that has a fetish for shooting people as an act of masculine identity power-politics in an environment where it’s easier to get a gun than a motorcycle… and it sucks.
The parents of dead kids aren’t even wrong here… in fact I hope they win. Sue 'em all really… the companies that train cops, every broadcast company and isp. I just hate the solidarity this will strengthen and how loud it is going to be online with fucking meta behind it. It hurts, but really I think no one actually cares about dead kids if it impacts access to their favorite toys. Or at least a critical mass of people has to care so much the rest of them get dragged. This is the real truth as I’ve discovered it in this world, some one wants me to believe in another one they’ll have to show it to me.
We are too busy dragging women into the stone age to be bothered with saving a few useless post-born lives anyway.
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As a transgender woman whose mere existence is threatened every single day, allow me to disagree with your stance on weapons being favorite toys. To me guns are just a tool that help me not die in the hands of enraged mob.
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As another woman who has been threatened and assaulted by men with guns more than once and who has lived in fear of them every night where I lay my little head in my not-living-in-a-power-fantasy-world more than once or twice…please stop. I am not here to relive trauma for you so that you can have a protective fantasy about your future. I am tired of being dragged and I am not taking any more. From anyone… including any other woman who DEFINITELY doesn’t have MY safety on the forefront of their mind either. So just stop. or, alternatively… come shoot me and prove me right because that’s all guns can ever achieve.
You think you are the only person who has ever been a target of violence or something?
I lived my whole life around guns and guns have not once done shit to protect me outside of poetic interpretations of foreign wars and the money we made from them. You can’t convince me otherwise because it’s my real goddamned life I’m talking about 40+ years of experience in guns not doing shit to protect me and everyone gaslighting about it. Tired of it. Just… tired of it.
You know what would have helped though? Laws and regulations around gun access and resources for women. Too bad we can’t have those.
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As a trans woman I have to ask; how many enraged mobs have you successfully faced down with a gun?
I’m not saying they can’t ever be used for self defense; but I doubt their holding much utility when surrounded by a mob.
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It’s not just confusion of the brand, but allowing people to make money off of their brand, or implying a relationship or endorsement that isn’t there.
Some brands are more zealous than others at protecting it (and some of them HAVE to be, because if your brand becomes a generic term, it becomes unenforceable as a trademark.)
An example not related to this post would be: let’s say you have an event, and you start plastering corporate logos on banners, even though they have nothing to do with it. e.g. a Coco-cola logo when you aren’t even serving it. That would be a misuse of trademarked logos. You’re trying to legitimize your event by implying all of these corporations are sponsoring it in some way.
So in this context, imagine a game that took place in a modern US civil war, or maybe just another game with a story line including Muslim terrorists. Some companies may not want their brand associated with a potentially controversial subject matter. And while a lot of adults do play these games, so do a lot of 14 year olds, and most companies aren’t actively marketing their brands to people who can’t even buy their product.
Now add in controversies like this (the whole “video games cause violence” attacks are decades old at this point) and possible liabilities from lawyers looking for a big payday, and you can see why companies send cease and desist letters to developers.
So it’s less about brand confusion and more about the brand being associated with something they don’t necessarily approve of or want to be associated with.
So a game may not have and H&K MP5, but have one that looks like it but call it a GSM-005 or something. Old model numbers that don’t have a active trademark or are military designations are free game.
If only your country had a way to amend your constitution.
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You are aware that amending the constitution takes sign on by 3/4ths of state legislatures, right? 
Not like we can just wave a magic wand and change it. It takes time, organization, and for our state houses not to be filled with pro-gun fascists…
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I’m afraid of what some might do if we go in that direction at this time.
Especially the constitutional convention approach.
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Yeah, that… as long as fascists hold enough state houses, we’re not going to like the results of such an event…
We need to take our states back first, and then we can make some more meaningful changes to the constitution.
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The actual complaint has some…rather questionable…hyperbole: “He has a feel for how much trigger pressure to apply; his body instinctively braces for varying levels of recoil; and he’s learned whether it will take one or two or three shots to kill.” because mouse and keyboard or controller interfaces definitely refine a totally different set of fine motor skills and reactions to force feedback that they are incapable of generating…
That said, it’s also taking the more interesting(and, in my utter layman’s impression, probably more promising) tack of advancing a connection between the specific AR-15 vendor and variant and accessories used and those featured in CoD and instagram-delivered marketing materials.
I’m not sure whether that will help them at all vs. the obvious counter argument that the defendants may have been successful in driving brand decisions; but that all the non spree killers buying DDM4Vs just to quietly gunwank over them; and the various spree killers who used less boutique models or just whatever was handy at home; suggest that selling specific models is a thing that they did but a thing which is separate from driving murderousness; but the detail and specificity of the argument advanced does put it in a more credible bucket than a generic ‘violent video games made him do the violence’ level arguments.
I don’t think video games increase violence and despite massive efforts, no studies have definitively shown that. There were and are a lot of rich people very interested in showing the games are to blame. Anything but the ready availability of guns.
Did the violent video games, particularly the online ones, or Meta and other social media contribute to the toxic masculinity and misogyny that underlies so many mass shooting? That’s more likely.
As for the gun makers. Fuck them. They should be sued into oblivion
At the very least, this lawsuit has been successful at dragging the Uvalde shooting, the failure of law enforcement, the disgusting availability of guns in the US, and the heartbreak of all those dead children back into the news cycle. I wonder if this is the point. To make it impossible for the public to forget about the murder of the children and what made that murder possible.
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They make a lot more sense if you stop thinking of them as terrorism and start recognizing them as suicide by cop.
This was only a suicide by cop if you want to overlook 95% of the deaths though…
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What that doesn’t explain is why they’ve taken up such hostile suicide methods. Spree killing certainly isn’t something you do expecting to make it out unscathed; but if you have the required tools for a mass shooting you’ve got the required tools for among the more reliable DIY suicide techniques available(inferior to specialist pharmacological techniques; but superior to more or less any other improvise-with-commonly-available-items options). You also don’t need to kill nearly as many people, if any, as mass shooters commonly do to give the cops sufficient incentive and justification if you absolutely must have someone else handle it for you. Even just some plausible menacing would likely be adequate for the purpose.
It also doesn’t explain much given that mass shooting is so rare compared to suicides by other methods: even if we do presume that it is, among other things, a suicide mechanism, there’s clearly something different about the spree killers vs. the much larger number of people who stop at just themselves.
