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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...
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#3: Attribution notice added
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
_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.