I was just reading
this last night...
This portion made me think of this thread, so I bring it for your perusal:
..."Individual words can't be copyrighted. They CAN be trademarked, but contrary to rumor you have no responsibility, as a fiction writer, to respect trademarks - only if you were marketing a product would you have such a responsibility.
McDonald's would have no grounds to sue you for having a character walk into a McDonald's.
They might WANT to sue you if you depicted McDonald's as a purveyor of meat derived from dead human corpses, but it would be tough for them to get past the "poetic license" and "satire" and "humor" restrictions on the libel laws. (If you were writing nonfiction, that is entirely a different matter.)"
The way I read this, so what if "Seal Team 6" is trademarked to DisneyCorp? It won't give them grounds to sue the government to get the Navy to stop using the identifier for the actual team in question. The Navy's "ownership" of the term demonstrably pre-dates the Stoopid Rat's
® attempt to put a legal lock on the term. It's not going to cause newspaper firms to chip a dime into the Stoopid Rar's
® retirement fund every time they print a story involving the REAL SEAL Team 6: the navy's prior ownership would throw the wrench in it in a big hurry.
About the only thing this does for the Stoopid Rat
®, is lock in who is going to see all the profit from the forthcoming "SEAL Team 6 Action Figures
® (with kung fu grip).