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I am not a lawyer, but No, you shouldn't use them. A unique invented name is copyrighted, and no in-story justification matters. The owners of the copyright have all the rights to make a profit u...
Answer
#4: Attribution notice removed
by
System
·
2019-12-19T22:13:08Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29962 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#3: Attribution notice added
by
System
·
2019-12-08T06:57:07Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29962 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
I am not a lawyer, but No, you shouldn't use them. A unique invented name is copyrighted, and no in-story justification matters. The owners of the copyright have all the rights to make a profit using that name; if you sell your story they may be entitled to all the profits and damages and court costs on top of that. You can't open a burger joint and call it McDonald's and say you just got lazy and this seemed like a _very_ popular name for a burger joint. That is what you are doing in your story, as an author, being lazy and stealing somebody else's work of imagination and trying to make money with it. Whatever your characters say won't matter in the least, just like it doesn't matter if your characters break the law and kill and murder people. They aren't real. They can steal. You cannot.
#1: Imported from external source
by
System
·
2017-08-28T18:44:27Z (about 7 years ago)
Original score: 0