Did Marty McFly cause problems with "Star Wars?"

[RivkahChaya]

@Lamia

To my (admittedly limited) knowledge, there is no law that would cover “theft” of a character name that was not protected by trademark. Even if I’m wrong about that, since “vader” is Dutch for “father” and very similar to the German “vater”, I think it would be pretty difficult to make a compelling argument that one of the Georges must have stolen the name from the other.

There’s also a town in Washington State called Vader. That’s why it’s going to have to be some name like “Sdaarbt Ffoedyr,” that someone writing in English would not come up with, and not a name that sounds like it could be English, even if no one actually has that name, like “Beru Skywalker.” Calling a planet “Vulcan” doesn’t take much imagination. Being the second person to call one “Kashyyyk” suggests that someone got a peek at an unpublished or unproduced work.

It’s really not the name itself: it’s that the use of it is proof of a larger violation.

[cochrane]

@Ranger_Jeff

I thought “Vulcan” was the name of a planet between Jupiter and Mars that broke up and became the asteroid belt.

No, Vulcan’s hypothetical orbit was proposed to be between the Sun and Mercury.

Vulcan (hypothetical planet)

[Andy_L]

@Ranger_Jeff

I thought “Vulcan” was the name of a planet between Jupiter and Mars that broke up and became the asteroid belt.

Apparently the hypothetical planet between Mars and Jupiter was referred to as Phaeton Phaeton (hypothetical planet) - Wikipedia

[Lamia]

@RivkahChaya

There’s also a town in Washington State called Vader. That’s why it’s going to have to be some name like “Sdaarbt Ffoedyr,” that someone writing in English would not come up with, and not a name that sounds like it could be English, even if no one actually has that name, like “Beru Skywalker.” Calling a planet “Vulcan” doesn’t take much imagination. Being the second person to call one “Kashyyyk” suggests that someone got a peek at an unpublished or unproduced work.

It’s really not the name itself: it’s that the use of it is proof of a larger violation.

I really do not think this is true, but if you have a cite that the use of an unusual name that is not protected by trademark in two different creative works is proof that one of the authors violated intellectual property law then I’d be curious to see it.

If the two works were substantially similar then the use of the same name might be taken as evidence of wrongdoing, but the name is the only detail from Star Wars that Marty shared with young George. Even if George uses the name in his fiction, a story based on his encounter with “Darth Vader” isn’t going to bear much resemblance to the Star Wars movies.