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Can I use a trademarked name in a book title (fiction)?
My wife would like to title a new novel with the name of a restaurant. But we don't know if she's allowed to do that.
For example, the title would be "Spago" (the famous W. Puck eaterie in Bev Hills) or "The Oak Room" (now closed, was inside The Plaza Hotel in NYC) or "Dahlia Lounge" (Seattle)?
It wasn't a book, but Suzanne Vega did this with "Tom's Diner" (which is the diner they always use in Seinfeld).
Before we contact the restaurant (who would probably say no even without looking at the book) or a trademark lawyer ($), we are asking here if anyone knows this or has been through this before. Her first novel used the name of a famous farmer's market in Seattle and while the name of the market itself wasn't trademarked, the famous Pike Place Market sign with the clock was. Their other famous "Public Market" sign is not trademarked, which is why that made the cover (and probably why it's the sign used in Grey's Anatomy and Sleepless in Seattle).
Thanks...
you can't copyright a title meaning you can use the name of the restaurant in the title of your book as long as there is no reasonable expectation that someone could confuse your work with the restaurant, of coarse if you really want to be sure you could call it "Spago: a Novel" So don't call it Harry Potter's Restaurant, unless its going to be a satirical novel in which case you would be protected by satire laws but you might get sued anyway just to cause enough trouble for you not to pursue it
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