The girl’s mother explained that officials said they could not process the application until Warner Brothers granted permission, because they owned the trademark for the name. Spoiler: Not true.
A 6-year-old girl was refused a British passport – a refusal which left her mother feeling “devastated”. The reason for the hard blow: her daughter has a name inspired by ‘Game of Thrones’.
Lucy, 39, from Swindon, told the BBC about the confusion that occurred after her daughter’s application was rejected by the passport office. Khaleesi. For those who need to refresh their memory, Khaleesi is a Dothraki title that refers to Queen Daenerys I Targaryen, princess of Dragonstone, queen of Meereen, mother of dragons (we’ll stop here) in the hit HBO series.
Lucy alleged that officials said they could not process the request until Warner Brothers granted permissionbecause they were the trademark owners of the name.
In fact, according to UK Government official websiteamong the names that cannot be used in passports are those that may offend the public (names that contain swear words, explicit sexual language, names associated with extremist gangs or organizations, or names that promote or incite racial hatred, religious hostility or criminal behavior); those that infringe trademark or copyright; or those that the system “cannot accept for technical reasons”, that is, names containing numbers, symbols or diacritics that would apparently cause the system to crash completely.
“I was absolutely desolate“We so wanted to spend our first vacation together,” Lucy told the British media, after having planned a “dream” trip to Disney Land Paris“. “But then I got a letter from the Passport Office, saying that your name is registered by Warner Brothers. It was the first time I had heard something like that. “I was amazed,” and she added that if her daughter’s name wasn’t noted when she got her birth certificate, why would it be a problem now?
It turns out that Lucy was right to be surprised, since, although there is a registered trademark for ‘Game of Thrones’, the personal name was, in fact, of free use. The officials have sorry for the mistakeexplaining that there had been a misunderstanding and that the guidance staff had originally given applied only to people who changed their names.
In the words of a Home Office spokesperson: “We can confirm that the application is being processed and we apologize to the family for the delay.” Lucy believes that the situation is only It has been resolved because he shared his experience on social media. “If I hadn’t posted it on social media, nothing would have been done,” Lucy suggested. “I would have been stuck, not knowing what to do. People contacted me about similar experiences.”
And if the series has taught us anything, it is that we do not have to wake up the dragon (of social networks).
Additional sources • BBC
