I have no clue what kind of thing this would go into.
Anyway, the team I'm on, well a fracture group of the team, is starting another game and we're basing it in our hometown. We're just wondering if it's legal to use names of things like the city and areas (Like call the city Sandpoint like it is in real life, and then the mountain and things that aren't privately owned). We're going to change the names of any businesses if we state names at all (but not the areas, like Sandpoint, street names, and the mountains/rivers names), but we're intending on using some similar architecture to make the environment as close as possible to what the city looks like in real life. And we don't know if we need to get permission from people who own buildings and houses that we would have a model of. Does someone own what the outside of what a building looks like that we need to ask?
Mostly because a little while ago, some company had a game based in a town a little north of us by accident (apparently they didn't know that it was a real place), and the town decided that the game had a dark theme that they felt would defame the town and tried to get money from the company for it. Not sure what happened with that, but I already had to deal with someone saying they were going to sue us a bit ago for infringing on a copyright that they didn't actually have, and I really don't want to go through it again.

