Jump to content

Trinity RPG - What if my name is being misused


Guest

Recommended Posts

I have noticed that my name is being used in one of the stories. I am shown as a bad guy. Most of the names in this story are my office colleagues and my name is pretty unique. How can I get to the author of this story and ask them to remove my name from his story. The names have obviously been provided by someone who knows me and my colleagues.

Appreciate any assistance.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hi Shyam, I'm a moderator of this forum. May I ask which story is using your names? You can answer over PM if you like, or this thread is fine. Keep in mind that a lot of the stuff on this site was written by people who don't come by on a regular basis anymore.

By the way, I'm assuming you're talking about material on this site. There's really not much we can do if your name is, say, Divis Mal.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hey, the moderator contacted me regarding this situation. I don't really see how it happened, we used things such as google searches and baby name sites to generate the names used in the book. Any time someone submitted names of Indian people they knew I believe we always recombined the first and last names.

However, it was of course never our intention to offend anyone and I apologise that you feel that way. I no longer have the software to edit PDFs, however, I have given my permission for the PDF to be edited and the offending names to be changed to something else.

As this would be a bit of trouble for the site people would you be okay if we just put in a thing about "any likeness to people living or dead is purely coincidental" or do you want us to change the names entirely?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Of course a problem can arise if one person uses either their own name (or a variation of it) or has permission to use the name of a friend, but someone else who shares that name (whether it be a John Smith or a Jake Stefakowski) might take offence. In which case there is not a great deal that can be done. That said, I don't imagine that any Michael Donighals out there would mind being associated with Divis Mal (villains are cool).

Seriously though, I think the "resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental" is probably a good code of practice to adopt for all future EON material, and possibly an edit for existing material where practical. That way our collective behinds are covered and inadvertent offence can be minimised.

Regards,

JC

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I should be able to edit it out(I still have the original PMDs I used to put it together), but I fail to see what the problem is. A name is a name, and quite frankly, the clearest example of fair use. No offence, but if we were to restrict our selves to useing only names that no one had, what would we call any character villainous or heroic?

-Slag

On a related note (having realized I do actually still have all those old files). If any of you ever actually sat down and wrote up an errata list for InUn, I might beable to move myself to go in an fix those mistakes.

-Slag

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have to agree with Slagheap on this one. Editing a fictional character's name just because a random person gets slightly miffed that they happen to share a name with that person is not really our problem. As I said in my previous post, editing the e-books to have the coincidental use disclaimer should be perfectly sufficient to satisfy any legal or common courtesy requirements.

There are a lot of people in the world, many of which share the same, or similar, names. It is unreasonable to have to edit our work just because someone doesn't like how a character they share a name with is prtrayed in a fictional work. If the person complaining happens to be a raving Aberrant who doesn't like bad press then fine (and I won't argue) but that is not the case here. I feel sorry for those people who share a name with the real monsters out there: the Geoffry Dahlmers, the Ian Huntleys, the Tony Blairs...

Just My Two-Cents (or so)

JC

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...