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Q&A Is sending your characters back to a different century a good way to disguise them?

Note: Not a legal expert If you based a character in a historical novel on a real person from the present, it would take a fair amount of concerted effort for anyone to even notice, and even if th...

posted 10y ago by Chris Sunami‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Answer
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T04:01:17Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/16109
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar Chris Sunami‭ · 2019-12-08T04:01:17Z (almost 5 years ago)
_Note: Not a legal expert_

If you based a character in a historical novel on a real person from the present, it would take a fair amount of concerted effort for anyone to even notice, and even if that character had distinctive traits or speech patterns linked to the real person, one could make a good case that it was usage for satire. No reasonable person would read an account of a historical figure as representing accurate information about a living person.

The only exception I could see is if the entire book was a thinly disguised account of a group of contemporary people, where the actions described were generally true to their present-day counterparts --which would be a tough thing to make historically plausible.

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2015-02-02T20:05:55Z (almost 10 years ago)
Original score: 4