Unintentional defamation

Unintentional defamation occurs where a work of fiction contains a character that coincidentally shares a name or other recognizable characteristics with a real person, such that the real person is defamed by the depiction.

A famous early case in the field, E. Hutton & Co. v. Jones (1910), was successfully brought by a person named Artemus Jones who sued a newspaper that had published a story about a fictional Artemus Jones.

In order to minimize the risk of unintentional defamation, producers of film, television, and radio programs will engage in a process of negative checking to ensure that the names of fictional characters cannot be confused with real life people, and will post a fictitious persons disclaimer stating that the characters portrayed in it are fictional, and not based on real persons.

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