: Re: Would it be a copyright violation if I made a character’s full name refer to a song? I want to write a realistic fiction book similar to Thomas Hardy’s works, where he used techniques

@Heady158

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This is not a copyright issue.

Summary:

I am not a lawyer, of course.
You can't violate copyright just by using a word, name, title, or other short phrase that somebody else used.
A different intellectual property right might apply, but as long as it's clear that you're writing fiction, it should be fine.
If you use a real person's name, though, be careful that they or their estate won't have some other complaint against you.

(This answer cites sources from a mishmash of jurisdictions, but thanks to international treaties like the Berne Convention, the basics of copyright are mostly the same around the world.)

Copyright covers "creative works".[Berne] [US] A name does not meet the standard for a "creative work".[UK p.4] [US] [US] Basically, it's too short.

A name might be protected by other intellectual property rights, though. The main one is trade mark (one word, "trademark", in US English).[UK] [US] [US] Someone might have a trade mark registration on a particular name or phrase, and if you use that in your writing, they might decide to take you to court.

However, they would have to prove that your use of their trade mark was likely to confuse the public about the identity of your products versus theirs,[UK] [US] which is unlikely if you're clearly writing fiction. (They might also claim that what you wrote was injurious to their reputation, but that's defamation rather than intellectual property.)

The other kind of right that might stop you from using a real person's name is the right of publicity, or personality rights. These are much more internationally variable, so I'll just link you to Wikipedia: Personality rights.

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