6-year-old girl denied passport because she’s named after ‘Game of Thrones’ character
A UK mother was left “absolutely devastated” after her daughter’s passport application was denied because she was named after a popular “Game of Thrones” character.
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.
Aren't they aware that the TV series is based on a book series..? If anyone owns the name it'd be George R.R. Martin...
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.
I still believe her actual name was Hodor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"queen" in Lojban is "nolraitruti'u."
https://mw.lojban.org/papri/me_lu_ju%27i_lobypli_li%27u_18_moi
😁🙂
The kid doesn't deserve this, but she doesn't deserve that name either.
Second of Her Name, Rightful Queen of the Bratz Dolls, The Breaker of Bedtimes...
Nice!
I'm pretty sure we're going to keep hearing about people with Game of Thrones names a lot over the next few decades lol I know I've read a few articles saying that Arya and Khaleesi were the most popular girls names for a few years before the series ended
Within the US, "Arya" peaked for baby girls at rank 92 in 2019. 3050 girls or 0.166% of female births were given the name.
"Khaleesi" peaked in 2018 at rank 550 and 0.030% of female births.
I'm assuming other spellings were less common.
Why the f is a passport office concerned with a trademark. It is a name of a child.. it does not infringe.
People with the last name "Ford" in shambles
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.
“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.
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"?
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.
I don't understand why the Passport Office would have even looked.
The name Wendy didn't exist until the book Peterpan. Every part of language is made up, even the names.
That's just not so. J.M. Barrie's book popularized Wendy as a girls name, but it predates the book by centuries.
oh man that's crazy. I always thought it was short for Gwendolyn.
Yeah but it's also the parents responsibility to give their child a non stupid name that won't get them ridiculed their whole life.
Parents being quirky with names is how you end up with kids getting bullied forever.
Edit: Glad to see all the people who weren't bullied downvoting this. My name isn't even that weird and I still get made fun of for it. Don't give your kids stupid names.
Kids will make fun of any name. My name is common in the area of the world I am from, and they bullied me with my name.
Fuck off with this shit that the name is the problem, kids probably just decided to bully because they are terrible little shits whise parents either don't care, or encourage them.
This is the same argument used in the UK to justify school uniforms. That kids would get bullied over their clothes, so let’s just make everyone wear the same thing. I’m wondering how you feel about that
Agreed on all fronts. Don't be a cruel parent and give your kid a fucked up name. If you can't find it on the keychain turnstile in a truck stop, your "cute" name for a kid is causing more trouble than it's worth.
I have a misspelled common name (and it's a common misspelling) and every call for every account in my whole life is a PITA.
You aren't clever or cute, don't fuck up your kid's name. Color your hair blue and you be unique, leave your poor child alone, dipshit.
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
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.
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.
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
This doesn't make any sense. UPS has trademarked the colour brown, yet I've known people with the last name Brown who have been able to get passports.
You named your daughter after a tv/book character famous for getting naked, railed, being a bit nuts, and losing a war? I guess she OG owned some dragons for a while. Destined to be bad ass destroy all mega lizards before season 8 destroyed an entire series.
I feel like Game of Thrones could have had Harry Potter levels of cultural staying power if they didn't completely fuck the ending.
I've enjoyed house of the dragon but other people have told me it's too slow
It being slow is exactly why I like it. A focus on characters over plot is sorely lacking in TV these days. Man we were truly spoiled in the aughts and early tens.
is there a court precedent for this? definitely not first child to be named after trademarked word
1a. Folks, before you name your children, don't make it easy for the big corporations to sue you. Those who "own" (i.e. use the government to suppress your right to free speech) a conlang, be it Dothraki, Klingon, or Tolkien's language care far more about profit than culture.
​
In 2012, 146 newborn girls in the United States were named "Khaleesi", the Dothraki term for the wife of a khal or ruler, and the title adopted in the series by Daenerys Targaryen.[3]
​
3c. wt:kalisi
Noun
kalisi (n class, plural kalisi)
Alternative form of kalisiamu
Etymology
Borrowed from English calcium.
Folks, before you name your children, don’t make it easy for the big corporations to sue you. Those who “own” (i.e. use the government to suppress your right to free speech) a conlang, be it Dothraki, Klingon, or Tolkien’s language care far more about profit than culture.
Fuck that. My kids have what most people would consider fairly common names, but I'll name them what I damn well please, and the very last thing I'm going to give a shit about is what some corpo thinks of it.
"I am Drogo Khal, your honor, and these are my two children, Walt Disney and Barbie Mattel."
Weren't a lot of kids name that when that show came out?
Probably that same boot licking employee from Taco Bell(?) now working for the passport office.
They called and said it was a mistake meaning some asshole employee went too far.
Are they worried that this 6 year old is stealing the identity of a fictional character? 🤨
My job entails handling certain things for the recently deceased. I processed a Khaleesi yesterday and my dumbass assumed it was a name that meant something for some culture or another, but immediately recognized the name for Daenerys as well.
Having looked, it's totally made up, but it's super badass, if I were to ever have kids, which I won't, cause fuck that, I'd be open to that being my daughter's name. It sounds real cool.
Still waiting to see an Aemon or Rhaenyra Targaryen
Bad news for anyone named Jessica.
What a tragedeigh!
Poor kid.
There should be a list of approved names for children.
Yeah I hear that's worked out really well in North Korea 🤣
We have that in my country, kinda. Any common name in the calendar can be chosen automatically. Any other name must be approved and you must prove that it's a real name somewhere (used significantly, one person with a weird name wouldn't count).
Who decides what goes on that list?
In a perfect world, me. But it would probably be better if there was a body of 100 or so individuals of diverse backgrounds to make sure we aren't excluding names for cultural reasons. Names could be submitted for approval. To weed out the Everleighs, the Sexiannas, the Khaleesis. And any names Jamie Oliver would pick.
I don't know why people think it is acceptable to treat names like an opportunity for creativity, or fun. Names are serious business. And they aren't a medium for self expression. If I name my dog after a type of pasta, who cares? But imagine having to give someone a business card with "Fusilli Feet" on it. I love Waterworld, but my kid will never have to put down "Mariner Feet" on a resume. My kid is not an extension of me, or my interests.