What’s In A Name?

Lawyers Scramble to Copyright Everything in Dictionary

According to the World Almanac, the most popular first name on earth is Mohammed. The most popular last name on earth is Wong. Strangely, there are so few people named “Mohammed Wong” on earth that it appears to strain the laws of statistical probability.

Basketball coach Pat Riley, now with the Miami Heat, wants everyone to win three consecutive titles so he can bilk them for the use of his made up word “three-peat.” Photo courtesy MSNBC.

When you have over six billion people inhabiting a single planet, there are going to be some odd coincidences. When it was announced that China had passed the one billion-population mark, a comedian observed, “that means if you’re a one-in-a-million guy in China, there are a thousand others just like you.”

It is at the beginning of the year that I am likely to think more about numbers, statistics and coincidence. With more than six million people on the planet, you’ve got to figure that there are a lot of coincidences going on at any one time. Like I always say, if there were no coincidences, that would be the strangest coincidence of all.

This week the University of Southern California Trojans are playing in the Rose Bowl for the right to be a three-time national football champion. They’ve been warned, however, not to use the word “three-peat” (or any variation of the spelling of that made up word) on any of their championship gear such as T-shirts and baseball caps. The NCAA wants them to avoid the word so they don’t have to pay a licensing fee to the guy that owns the right to it.

That’s right, some guy owns the rights to a made up word. That guy happens to be NBA coach Pat Riley who claims he coined the word in the 1980s when his team, the Los Angeles Lakers, won three straight championships. It is not known whether he was the first to use the word “three-peat” but he certainly was the first to hire some lawyers to get it copyrighted.

Riley has supposedly earned more than a million dollars from his copyrighted word, mostly thanks to merchandise associated with the “three-peats” of the NBA’s Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers (no longer coached by Riley). You can bet old slick-haired Riley is rooting for the New England Patriots to win its third straight Super Bowl this year.

Words are not the only thing being copyrighted and contested these days. When the cable channel TNN (The Nashville Network) decided to change its format to “the first network for men,” in 2003, its parent company, Viacom, also decided to change the name from TNN to Spike TV.

“Not so fast,” said film director Spike Lee who promptly sued Viacom for infringement over the use of his name.

Some thought he was bluffing. He wasn’t. With a steadfast poker face Mr. Lee—whose real name isn’t Spike but actually Shelton Jackson Lee—stared down Viacom until they decided to settle out of court and give him an undisclosed sum of cash. Viacom backed down even though the word “spike” has many connotations outside the realm of Mr. Lee’s nickname. The Oxford Modern Dictionary includes such definitions for spike as “a sharp pointed piece of metal,” “sport shoes with spikes on the bottom,” “to lace a drink with alcohol or drugs,” “a marked increase on a graph” and “a flower cluster formed of many flower heads attached closely on a long stem.”

If some guy can lay claim to the word “spike,” you sure as heck don’t want to have the words “oprah” or “conan” in the name of your new business.

During one of my first years in the newspaper business I ran into a copyright situation that bothers me each year at this time. No holiday has more historical significance for my generation than the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the middle of January. When this state and national holiday was about to roll around, I did some research thinking it might be a good idea to publish Reverend King’s “I Have A Dream” speech in The Mountain Times. The speech was delivered by King to a crowd of 250,000 from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. on August 28, 1963, just hours after King had met with President Kennedy. The speech is one of the more inspirational spoken documents in our nation’s history and—in my mind—ranks right up there with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in importance.

But King was a private citizen, not an elected official. Therefore his writings and even his public speeches remain the copyrighted property of the King Family. They are not in the public domain. They are not cheap either, and are out of the reach of a free publication such as the one you hold in your hands right now.

I hope that the King Family will eventually relent to the free temporary use of the “I Have A Dream” speech each year at this time so that everyone can read it on an annual basis. That is my dream.

Until then, I remain your humble writer, Jeff Eason. (The name “Eason” is copyrighted and cannot be used without the permission of the author. I’ll see the rest of you Easons in court! That goes for you too, Mom!).