QUESTION
Can someone copyright a historical name or ethnic label?
Asked on Nov 03rd, 2013 on Intellectual Property - California
More details to this question:
Some guy is sabre-rattling me (lawsuit) because he claims he "coined" a term that is 500 years old. Can someone "coin" a copyright if they have used an historical term, which I learned from them, and then began using on my own separate Facebook page?
1 ANSWER
The short answer is NO. There are two reasons why this guy has no copyright to enforce. First, individual word and short phrase are not considered to have sufficient originality to be copyrightable, and secondly, for anything to be copyrightable, it has to be original and for you to have infringed a copyright, you would have had to have copied it. Thus, if this is a 500 year old term and you adopted it from the ancient source, even if this guy had a copyright (which cannot as noted) you would not have infringed it if you did not know of his version and therefore did not copied it.
Answered on Nov 04th, 2013 at 9:26 AM