Re: Real names in a football game
David Schleef <ds@schleef.org>:
> Names of people are (curiously) less protected. It's probably
> defendable to use players' names in a game, but (at least in the
> US) it would likely attract annoying lawyers, too. I wouldn't
> recommend it. But then, I morally feel celebrities deserve the
> same protection in their own name as a corporation.
There has to be a free way of referring to people and things, or free
speech and free communication are no longer possible. As I understand
it, when a corporation registers their name as a trademark you are
still allowed to use that name to refer to that corporation.
Obviously I have no idea how the law really works, but it would be
strange if you were not allowed to use someone's name but you were
allowed to refer to them in some other way (in the case of a football
game, for example, by the colours and number of their shirt). Take
this to its "logical" conclusion and you'd end up with a situation
like that which I am told existed in some North American Indian
nations: people had a real name which they kept secret while everyone
referred to them with a different, publicly known name. In the new
situation the real names would be "protected" rather than secret, but
that would be sufficient to stop journalists from using the real
names, so people would end up being known to the public under a
different, unprotected name.
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