Can You Own a Word?

 On Facebook the official DC account posted this:

And I laughed and said, "Really?  Avenge?"  I mean, come on.

And of course other people are like, "What?  Marvel doesn't own that word."

Well, no, they don't OWN it in the legal sense, but they own it in the court of public opinion.  I mean it's the base word of one of the most successful franchises in movie history.  There's an obvious connotation between that word and Marvel.  So unless they're hoping to trick people into thinking it's a Marvel movie, it's kind of a stupid thing to do.

There have been cases where people try to trademark some pretty common word.  There was a romance author who tried to copyright some pretty ordinary word and it was just completely ridiculous and I think it eventually got thrown out of court.  Marvel really can't say DC can't use the word "Avenge" in ads or even titles, but it's just kind of a common sense thing.

Word association is a psychological test they can give people.  If I say, "Avenge" what do you think people would associate with it:  Marvel or Black Manta?  Duh.  And acting like it's just some random word they used is pretty ridiculous; Avengers movies have made like $10 Billion!  Or probably more than the entirety of the DC movie universe.

Even if your property existed first there can still be that problem.  Like the TV show Avatar: The Last Airbender came out years before James Cameron's "masterpiece" Avatar.  But since the live action movie of the former came out second, they mostly called it The Last Airbender so people wouldn't associate it with the billion-dollar movie.

That's something to keep in mind when you're looking for a title for a story.  I mean, I can call my book Gone With the Wind or Slaughterhouse-Five or Twilight or something like that, but people are still going to think of the other one.  While legally you might be able to do it, it's probably not sensible from a practical point of view.  Unless you're hoping people will be looking for that book and yours will pop up, which is unlikely.

In that vein, I might have mentioned once before how I looked up Carl Hiaasen's author page and there's clearly a book that's not his but it has pretty much the same name as his--Skintight vs Skin Tight--so Amazon just stupidly lumped them together and despite that I've flagged it a few times they still don't change it.  Or how Amazon stupidly put reviews for a different book called Naughty or Nice on my book called Naughty or Nice.  Don't expect Amazon to be smart enough to know which one is yours and which is someone else's.

Anyway, by now the Aquaman movie is on pace to make about half the first one.  So it's flopped less than The Marvels but still didn't do great.  Guess this poster didn't really help much.