Khaleesi, 6, a passport was denied — with officials telling her she needed Warner Brothers’ approval because it owns the name’s trademark.
Typical capitalist brain rot.
Shouldn’t they also use the same bullshit excuse when issuing an ID card? At least make the dumb rules consistent.
By this logic, everyone named Mickey should be paying Disney a royalty…
Wait shit retract delete delete DISNEY I DID JOT SAY ANYTHING DONT GET ANY FUCKING IDEAS NOW.
Mickey is a real name, though. It wasn’t invented by Disney.
Not that their lawyers would care lmao
Yeah if anyone ever expected copyright law or lawyers to be even remotely logical or sane, they’ve got another thing coming to them…
Disney just announced a new IP, Empire of Love. No relation I’m sure.
OH FUUUUUUUUUU-
This comment has been removed due to a copyright claim by Walt Disney Corporation of America
The Passport Office reportedly later called Lucy to apologize for the error.
They screwed up, and have admitted they screwed up. Did nobody read the article?
I got half way before the pop-ups became too much.
Fair enough.
Holy shit you weren’t kidding. And I’m on Firefox Focus behind a PiHole with a multi-million blocklist.
Does the WB even own that trademark? You have to manually apply for each one. Also, trademarks are specific to commercial operations and two companies are allowed to share if they aren’t in the same business. I don’t think trademark laws even apply here.
Shouldn’t they also use the same bullshit excuse when issuing an ID card? At least make the dumb rules consistent.
To be fair, ID cards aren’t common in the UK and passports are very common. This is quite probably the first time she’s applied for any form of ID. Not agreeing with it, just saying.
The idiocy of naming your kid Khaleesi aside, the UK just decided that a corporation can own your name and prevent you from enjoying the rights of your citizenship.
That’s pretty fucked.
Edit - Apparently they did backtrack. But it’s still amazing that anyone even thought that was a thing.
Khaleesi is a nice name aside from the fact that I think it’s a title…
Khaleesi is a title, not a name. In the fictional world of “Game of Thrones,” it means “queen” in the Dothraki language and is given to the wife of a Khal, the leader of a Dothraki tribe. The character Daenerys Targaryen is often referred to as Khaleesi. - chat gpt
Ya… It’s a title.
I’ve had students named Happy, Classic, Diamonds, Epiphany, Scorpio, you name it. I wouldn’t even cock my head to the side with a Khaleesi on my roll sheet at this point.
You name it is the weirdest of them all.
A-aron?
Classic? Who in the right mind!
Hippies.
You know the Gilmores?
There are literally people named “Princess”. Not that I think that does wonders for their life either.
The Passport Office reportedly later called Lucy to apologize for the error.
No, they can’t. That’s not how copyright works. Read the damn article.
But how can I be outraged then?
I am glad to hear they’re not officially taking corporate feudalism for a ride.
The idiocy of naming your kid Khaleesi aside
It’s nice sounding as a name though, I wouldn’t be in a rush to condemn someone for it. Now when it’s the 5th “unique” spelling of Madison that starts to get a little ridiculous.
It’s a nice sounding name if you don’t know where it comes from. Considering how well known Game of Thrones is it sounds like “I’m sorry your parents are idiots.”
Fair point!
It seems that there is only two restrictions in the UK on naming a child at birth. That is that it must fit on a single line on the birth certificate and not contain numeric characters except things like ii to refer to the second.
If you want to change your name later in life there is a lot of restrictions but as far as I know copyright enforcement is still not one. You can find a list here if you are interested.
I dated a girl named Mercedes.
Mercedes is actually an old Spanish name too though.
Mercedes was the name of Emil Jellinek’s daughter, Emil has the idea to develop sports cars, he designed and commissioned cars from an engineering company and named the model-line after her.
Are you saying they should just use lojban?
Presumably they won’t get sued by IP (“intellectual property”) trolls.
Until they register in that language too
Perhaps you’re correct.
I tried looking into copyright status of Lojban and found nothing.
I’m pretty sure wp:Láadan was released into the public domain.
Láadan word for “queen.”
http://www.laadanlanguage.org/l2e.html
unáhizh
Fwiw, the passport office also backtracked. But now I have a new Internet rabbit hole, so thanks for that!
So, they passport office is concerned that WB won’t approve? ffs.
Right? Like did she have to ask WB for permission to name her kid Khaleesi? Of course not! It’s a kid’s name not a spin off series lol
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The Passport Office reportedly later called Lucy to apologize for the error. While officials said they’d now be able to process little Khaleesi’s passport, Lucy said she believes the problem was only solved because she complained on social media.
Sounds like the passport office didn’t understand how trademark works.
Doubt the “whole office” was even involved. More likely it was one incompetent employee. We’ve all been there. It depends on who answers your call as to what answer you get.
Yup. This is the boring but likely true response. You get the one Gareth/Dwight who remembers that memo about not using trademarks in marketing materials and decides they know how this all works and that the rights of Warner Brothers have to be respected before putting their intellectual property on a published document. “Just get the appropriate permission on corporate letterhead and notarized, and this will all be fine.”
Social media is one way to fix it, but I tend to think a couple of layers of escalation would have worked as well, if a bit more slowly.
It’s almost like people should know how their job works
The government’s not real good about hiring the best pick for each position. Irregularly run into people who have no clue how to actually run their job, and there’s little to no consequences to f****** people’s lives up by doing it incorrectly.
That’s hardly specific to the government. A couple years ago, Hertz falsely reported 364 customers for grand theft auto. Some of them went to jail.
Most places I’ve worked had incompetent workers. Every state and government agency I’ve ever worked for was made primarily of incompetent workers
“I never thought you could trademark a name,” she added.
I hope my son Marvel’s The Amazing Spider-Man is not going to get in trouble.
If not, he can hang in trademark prison with Chalupa Batman.
I just want to know why I got 5 guys in suits and trenchcoats visiting me after I applied for a passport for my kid, Bobby Drop Tables?
dammit which XKCD was it
You know I had it ready.
Reminds me of this.
I’ll recommend my father, Doritos Locos Tacos, who’s a lawyer.
This is their fault for not checking the username db first. Should’ve tried xXx_khaleesi_xXx instead
omw to change my name to ’ AND id IS NULL; –
Good old Bobby Tables
the initial application to get her daughter, Khaleesi, 6, a passport was denied — with officials telling her she needed Warner Brothers’ approval because it owns the name’s trademark.
This is a lot dumber than I thought. Yes, Khaleesi is a stupid name but it is their official name on government papers. They’re seriously telling her “your daughter can’t use her legal name without permission from Warner Brothers”?
God help anyone with the last name McDonald!
Old Mc*onald gonna need to lawyer up
IAIA … ooh
Or in this case IA IA IANAL
If you bothered to read the rest of the article, you’d know they made a mistake, and later apologised for it.
They still said it. Someone was dumb enough to tell her that in the first place even if it was later corrected.
I don’t know, this level of not knowing what your job is kinda goes past oops sorry.
As the article states this is bullshit and who knows what the person who denied her passport was thinking.
I’ve met someone whose legal name was Pepsi and she was able to get regular government documents without contacting PepsiCo.
It’s unfortunate this mom had to go to a lawyer for this crap.
That’s a cool name
It’s the Name for a New Generation
I love you too, Pepsi.
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It’s not, and the article clearly says it’s not.
I don’t understand why the Passport Office would have even looked.
What’s wrong with passport offices? Here in the states I tried to get my passport in my teen years. I filled all the paperwork paid for it and everything when it came time to get the passport they were just like"you don’t exist your social security number isn’t real" and that’s b******* since my mom had been literally filing taxes with that number as a dependent my entire life. The passport office said tough s*** fax me all your ID information maybe we can do something. So I literally hooked up a fax machine in 2014 and sent everything off but still nothing.
Tl;Dr US passport office told me I’m not a person and took my money anyway.
A. Call your Congress critter. Part of their job is tracking stuff like this down.
B. Go check with SSA immediately. That can be a big problem later.
This is what congress people are for.
I’m not familiar with how voting works in America but like…
Can you vote? I mean it thinks you’re not a person, can non-people vote?
I can and have voted since. The passport office was just on something
People in this thread frothing at the mouth because it’s a title, not a name, must have forgotten about Caesar. And that it doesn’t matter - people call their kids all kinds of weird shit.
You mean Gaius Julius Caesar? Caesar was his last name, aka family name.
His family name was Julius (because he was from the family of the Iulii). Caesar was a title and since Augustus became part of the name when the position was taken up.
Caesar was a title
Caesar became a title after the collapse of the Republic, largely because the Augustine line carried it forward as proof of legitimacy. There was no position of “Caeser” within the Roman Republic, just a family name dating back to Julius Caeser’s great-grandfather.
Well, technically both Julius and Caesar were his last names, Caesar was an extra name of unknown origin in his family branch. Since him it became a title.
I stand corrected, thanks
Why is this getting downvoted? Its absolutely correct.
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In case anyone else wanted to save a click, daughters name is Khaleesi and it was denied because “Warner brothers trademark”
The people involved with this bullshit should be sacked. Typical power-tripping idiots.
Can’t see anything wrong with calling your child after your favorite character
Well, for starters the character’s name isn’t even Khaleesi.
Tell that to Jorah.
The knight who refers to his noble ruler by her title? I’m pretty sure he knows her name.
I’m just glad the parents named her that before the last season of GOT released.
Otherwise it would be even more concerning.
Khaleesi
I fully expected her to be named “Reek”.
Hodor was my bet
