A very minor ethical dilemma

[camwyn]

My job requires that I do an awful lot of work with our chapter's fundraising database. As it's quite an old DB and has pulled in records from a number of sources, I have to do quite a lot of data hygiene work - going through the records to merge duplicates together, delete bad records with no gift data, correct mucked-up addresses, etc. This means that I often run across absolutely fascinating names

Given the nature of privacy and the lack thereof in the United States, is it wrong of me to want to steal names from the list when they strike me as absolutely stunning for RPG characters? I mean, it's one thing to lift a single last name and not attach it to any identifiers, or a first name for that matter (I chose Sgt. Preston's mythical wife's name by looking at the list of people who had donated money that day), but ... well, some combinations are just too damn cool.

Comments

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

I used to collect phone books to do exactly the same thing -

And after working for two writers, I discovered I wasn't out of the ordinary - they just had the research department clear them before they were used.

Ethical. Hmm. Flattering to the parents who came up with them, maybe.

[sdelmonte]

Well, as my Simon DelMonte moniker is a reworking of the name of someone I knew in high school, I clearly have little trouble with using actual names as fodder (especially since I'm not likely to use my pseudonym as a pen name for profit). In an RPG, just for fun, it seems fine.

However, if you used some particular and peculiar name in a book or screenplay, you could face a lawsuit from someone. It has happened - anyone else remember the Tony Twist lawsuit that Todd McFarlane was in? OK, there it was a semi-famous hockey player and a character with him name who was a mobster. But we see the legal problems.

But I don't really see much in the way of ethics problems. Indeed, I sometimes think that odd names in novels are drawn in much the same way.

[camwyn]

Tell me you can't find an RPG role (or a comic book one, for that matter) for someone with a name like Therapon Stratos! Or Signy Hammer (okay, I got that one off a cubicle in an office I once worked at in New York), Harry Morgenfruh, or Tassos Dionysos. There's plenty of more Anglo-Saxon names in the database, too, but the ones that tend to pop out when I'm working are usually from ethnic groups on the Continent rather than the British Isles.

[zou.livejournal.com]

When I was working, I was dealing with papers and more papers and even more papers. A lot of them had lists of names of soldiers. I took some down, making lists of good, but ordinary names. Since then, pretty much ever PC has had a last name from the list.

Teed, Ellicott, Hall, Cross, Rhydwen, and the ever-famous, ever-delectable SKALICKY. I swear I saw that name and immediately knew I had to use it. And then this character idea started developing...

[camwyn]

Heh. When I was a phonetech on the computer help desk at BigScaryDrugCo, Inc., we used to see the first initial and last name of our callers on our phones. One day someone called in whose name was given as S. CADMUS. It was just too neat for words to see such a mythological name, and I started thinking about it. I eventually changed the first initial and the transliteration and got Vassilia Kadmos, the astronaut sidhe, out of it. (Vassilia's parents had their own way of celebrating the moon landing in 1969 - let's just say that whole 'sidhe souls displacing mortal ones' wasn't exactly a problem for the girl. She also acquired a chimera in orbit one time, thanks to the combined songwriting efforts of Messrs. Bowie and Schilling.) Didn't have half as cool a concept as dear old Licky, though.

[batyatoon]

I've done the same thing. Well, for story characters rather than RPG characters, but ...

Came across the name Magna Menier while doing data entry, and within minutes I had the entire character: middle-aged widow, wealthy, high office in one of the Guilds, et cetera, down to habitual clothing choice.