Fictional Character Names & Trademark Law: Who Owns a Story?

In the Mexican state of Sonora, you cannot legally name your child Harry Potter. You can, however, name him Voldemort.

Nobody planned that outcome. Nobody sat in a Sonoran government office in 2014 and deliberately decided that the Dark Lord was preferable to the boy who survived him. The 61-name ban — Rambo, Robocop, Facebook, Lady Di, and, yes, Harry Potter, alongside his classmate Hermione — was drafted to prevent “derogatory, pejorative, discriminatory or lacking in meaning” names from following a child through life. Nobody on that committee appears to have checked whether Tom Riddle’s preferred alias made the list. It didn’t. Somewhere in Hermosillo, a bureaucrat closed a loophole roughly the width of a wand and left a canyon-sized one right beside it, and the canyon has a genocidal snake-faced wizard living in it.

This is the part of intellectual property law nobody ever warns you about at parties: the sprawling, quietly deranged effort to determine, case by case, country by country, whether a fictional person’s name belongs to the world or to whoever invented them.

What a Name Actually Protects

Start with the legal mechanics, because they’re weirder than the anecdotes. A fictional character’s name cannot, by itself, be copyrighted — copyright protects the expression, the actual prose describing the character, not the two or three syllables assigned to him. What a studio or publisher actually files for is a trademark, and trademark law protects something narrower and stranger than ownership of a name: it protects the public’s ability to trust that a name reliably points back to a single commercial source. The U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board made this explicit in a case involving a children’s-book cat named Furr-Ball Furcania, ruling that a character appearing on the cover of exactly one book doesn’t automatically “function as a mark,” because nobody buying a second, unrelated Furr-Ball product would actually be confused about where it came from. You don’t own a name. You own the public’s confusion about it, and only once you’ve generated enough of that confusion to matter.

Which is how you end up with 2012’s single strangest trademark lawsuit, Fortres Grand Corp. v. Warner Bros. Entertainment. A real Indiana company had spent years selling real data-wiping software called CLEAN SLATE. Warner Bros. then put a fictional piece of software also called “clean slate” into the plot of The Dark Knight Rises, invented for two scenes and never sold to anyone anywhere. Fortres Grand sued anyway, arguing the movie had generated so much buzz around the fake product that customers were searching for the real one and getting confused. The court dismissed the case — but only after seriously entertaining, in a written federal opinion, the question of whether a make-believe piece of software inside a Batman movie could commit trademark infringement against a real one. Somewhere, a small Indiana software company’s legal bills are the actual proof that fiction and commerce have stopped respecting the wall between them.

The Ghosts Who Keep Changing Their Names

Consider Shazam. If you’re under thirty, that’s simply the name of the DC superhero who says the magic word and turns into a muscular adult. If you’re old enough to remember when the character was still called Captain Marvel, you’ve watched a five-decade property dispute play out in real time on the covers of children’s comics. DC’s character was originally, unambiguously, Captain Marvel — until Marvel Comics itself, a company that did not create him and had no hand in his story, registered the trademark on the words “Captain Marvel” for an entirely different, later character. DC kept the copyright on its own hero. It simply lost the right to put his name on the cover. For decades now, one of the best-selling superheroes in American comics has had to be marketed under a nickname because two different corporations are quietly holding two different halves of his own identity, and neither will hand the other one back.

You might want to take a moment to mull that over. This is corporate absurdity, filed in triplicate at the USPTO, and it has been legally binding since before most of the character’s current readers were born.

Where the Bureaucracy Reaches Into Your Living Room

The strangest part isn’t the corporate warfare. It’s how far downstream the warfare travels — all the way to a passport office. A family in Europe attempted, a few years back, to name their newborn daughter Khaleesi, the invented Dothraki honorific popularized by Game of Thrones. Personal names are not, under any standard reading of trademark law, goods or services — a baby is not a product line. The passport office flagged the application anyway and requested a formal letter of consent from Warner Bros. before it would issue documents for a six-year-old girl’s own name. Nobody at that office believed the toddler was launching a competing fantasy franchise. The caution itself is the disease: a system so thoroughly trained to defer to trademark holders that it started asking a media conglomerate’s permission to let a child exist under her own government-issued name.

New Zealand won’t let you name a baby “King” or “Saint,” on the theory that titles imply authority a newborn hasn’t earned. Italy bans naming children after protagonists of movies and television outright, no exceptions, no case-by-case Sonora-style list required. Of course, Italy also bans giving a child more than three names, and/or giving a child the same first name as a living father. Every one of these rules was written by a different legislature solving a slightly different anxiety, and every one of them arrives, from a different direction, at the same underlying discomfort: a name that used to belong to nobody in particular has started to feel like property, and property requires a fence.

The Fence Around the Imaginary

And, here’s what should actually bother you, once the trivia of it all wears off: None of this — not Furr-Ball Furcania, not the Batman software, not Shazam’s stolen mononym, not a toddler’s passport — was ever really about protecting a story. It’s about protecting a revenue stream that happens to be shaped like a story, and a name is simply the cheapest, most durable handle a company can grab hold of when it wants to fence something that was never physical to begin with. You can’t patent a feeling. You can’t easily copyright a vibe. But a name — two or three syllables, endlessly repeatable, instantly recognizable — is property law’s favorite kind of imaginary land, because it can be staked, surveyed, and defended in court exactly like the real thing, even when the thing itself never existed anywhere except on a page.

The next time you watch a franchise quietly rename a spinoff, or notice a fan-favorite nickname suddenly vanish from the marketing, very likely you’re not watching an editorial choice. You’re watching a boundary dispute over a plot of land nobody can visit, fought by people who understood something the rest of us are only catching up to: whoever holds the deed to the name gets to decide who’s allowed to live in the story.

The Bureaucracy of Make-Believe: Inside the Legal War Over Fictional Names