do celeberities copyright their names?

Question

should they be allowed to copyright their names, since businesses are allowed to do that to protect their invention assets?

Answer 1

Their names cannot be copyrighted.
The only protection that they have is that they can forcibly purchase a website using their name if it was purchased by someone else for squatting purposes.

Answer 2

No.

A name CANNOT, by law, be copyrighted. There are probably hundreds of Jennifer Annisons and Ben Aflecks in the world, and thousands of "Eddie Murphy"s - what would they do - make the others change their names?

You can't even copyright the name of a book or movie. A few minutes on IMDB will turn up dozens of instances of different movies with the same name, and your local library can show your hundreds of books that have the same name as other books.

Richard

Answer 3

Richard is right; a name cannot be copyrighted. On a related note, some states recognize a right of publicity, so famous people have some recourse when usage of their name/likeness is abused.
Vanna White had a suit about this a while back.

Answer 4

a name cannot be copyrighted...however it CAN BE TRADEMARKED

and it wouldn't prevent anyone from HAVING the same name, just using it in the same professional manner

for instance you COULD call your company IBM...as long as you are not selling business machines technology....it could stand for International Baseball Mitts and as long as your logo is totally different, you would not be "causing confusion in the marketplace"

no one looking for computers would come to you, and no one looking for baseball gloves would go to "IBM"

hope this helps

Answer 5

They do it all the time and yes they should be able to.

Answer 6

yes

Answer 7

Yes. Absolutely.

Answer 8

no