: Re: Is it legal to name a character in a story after a disguised trademark? I'm writing a sci-fi book series. As a true nerd, I want to use some characters to "do homage" to famous scientists,

The specific issues you are dancing around are "Trade mark dilution" and "Libel and slander". Trade mark worries can be mitigated by:

not using the exact mark, and
not using it in the same industry.

Pepsi and Microsoft do not write novels. Using anagrams of the mark is not the same mark. For example, Pepsi-cola and Coca-cola are different trademarks. For libel and slander concerns as long as your work can be considered a parody, satire, or allegory, they would have a very weak case. Also, as lawyers tend to be literalists, they won't notice if you don't get too blatant.

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: Re: Is it legal to name a character in a story after a disguised trademark? I'm writing a sci-fi book series. As a true nerd, I want to use some characters to "do homage" to famous scientists,

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: Tools for writing scripts It has been a long time since I last tried to write a play, and I hated it, not the play (which became a short story), but writing one. The word processors made

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