Been lots of talk over time about randomizing things… Figured I’d post a hopefully complete recollection of what I’ve heard float by so far…
Random books, random t-shirts/hats (slogans or images), random posters/graffiti or flyers for bands/events, random street names, randomly assembled horrors (monsters), random store names, random zomb versions of local personalities (weathermen, police chiefs, mayors etc), [from here I’m searching randomized/randomly on entire forums for results…] random structure damage, randomized item rarity/quality (probably goes against some future crafting plans though this could be used on zombie qualities, like emaciated zombie, ragged zombie, muscular zombie, mangled zombie, feeble crippled tall obese etc, that would modify their speeds, strengths and weaknesses)…
All my favorite parts of DF involve randomization like this, and once implemented it goes on and on and keeps spitting out hilarious or ominous results. Its one of those things that gets people rushing to the forums to brag (or be mortified) because they found an amazing bit of random goodness, or to at least suddenly laugh out loud at 1am because you found a cooking book called The Difficult Meat or a band poster advertising a performance by The Reproductive Grandmothers
Any other ideas on things that could be randomized? I’ll apply the Care Bear Stare to any dev that undertakes any one of these!! (Just googled Care Bear Stare to make sure it means what I thought, and urbandictionary defines it as: “The often intimidating gaze of undivided lust issued by a gay man towards his prey.”, so yeah, it means what I wanted it to
What you need then is a pool of the brand names associated with commercial products; couple of tens of thousands so you could combine them all into vicious or well whadda heck - crazy.
I think that’s legal with open source mainline. Not sure what goes after it’s depicted in the media.
I don’t know how difficult it’d be but a list of “If then re-roll” would stop that wouldn’t it?
…Then again there’s thousands of bands out there and to be honest if it’s randomly generated as long as it’s not consistently generated what’s the legal standpoint on that? Is “It was equally as likely to have been named “Wang King” as it was “Burger King”” a legal defence? XD
To be honest, if a random name generator came up with a trademarked name e.g Burger/King, I really don’t think there would be a case for copyright infringement as that name would be exclusive to only a small subset of games played by users per world generation-- and, god willing the actual generation would be random. If it was skewed to only produce trademarked names more often than not then there might be a problem. Otherwise, if it is completely random code permitting it could just as easily end up as Burger Kong, Burger Joint, Burger Shack… etc…
Then again, what do I know I’m not a copyright lawyer.
You could always just screen the database used for the generation, as I’m assuming you’d use some kind of dictionary of allowed words to generate from. e.g No Starbucks, but Star and Bucks would be okay.
Alternatively, change one or more letters in the trademarked name. Sudway, Bursar King. Star*ucks.
It’s a legit move in common media. Voila, no lawsuits.
Not an issue, really. Lawyers don’t generally go trolling for minor things like this, so unless one specific combination gets media attention somehow, not a problem.
If it does, improbably, result in a legal mention, than the ‘this was unintentional/random/user-generated’ gets a lot of ground… refer to the Marvel vs City of Heroes thing; the fact that it’s possible to randomly/intentionally create a mention of something that it copyrighted/trademarked is fine, so long as the copyrighted/trademarked thing wasn’t hardcoded in.
If that’s not enough, then and only then would you want to specifically add in code to prevent the one specific thing that the one specific lawyer has a bug up his ass about. That said, since there’d be a nontrivial chance of any such nuisance lawsuit failing, and losing the company in question money, it’s really unlikely that things would get this far, and really trivial to accede to their demands if it comes to demands, so nothing to worry about.
Trademark (not copyright) infringement is only triggered if there is brand confusion, there’s no way you would mistake a game that calls something “burger king” one game out of a million with a Burger King ™ product.
Is this even a liability? so many mainstream games include brand names illegally, who is going to sue a roguelike game if he is not enjoying it himself?
That’s a hot topic. I agree with everybody else, but the fact that the names are randomly generated locally on a gamer’s machine means we’re not responsible in a case where a player just stumble across a real copyrighted name, because the name was not original from the code. It emerges from it. You can’t say “oh ! They are legally responsible for naming it Burger King” since it’s a pure coïncidence.
The incident is local, and I don’t think a 12 years-old kid living in a small town in the middle of nowhere who just regonized Burger King in Cataclysm : Dark Days Ahead is going to alert the lawyers. I mean… come on ! It’s a kid.
And, by the way… Who’s gonna consider it ? Hundreads of millions of videogames in the world are not respecting trademarks. What’s the point of defending a cause like this ? And it’s opensource ! As Endovior said, only a stupid troll could go out in the streets and alert the cops because his computer is supposedly a communist. Unless the medias are interrested into the affair, nobody’s gonna care. If there is no money attached to it, there won’t be any law sharks chasing after it.
One way to have trademarked/copyrighted stuff in game is to make things moddable.
For example, lets assume we will have “collectible” items and I’d like to have little plastic ponies as collectible item.
What we need is just infrastructure to add your own lists of stuff easily, like “collectibles.txt” file. In vanilla version of CDDA there is no trademarked/copyrighted stuff - but anyone as individual could create such collections and share them if they seem fit. That would keep the main thing “clean”, but compability would be guaranteed and planned and they would be “functionally same” regardless of list size or different categories added.
The random generator accidentally makes a Burger King and suddenly we’re having our open-source pants sued off 
