Faking your own death for taunting purposes Suppose you cause it to be falsely reported that you have died, and your purpose is only to see your enemies gloating over your demise at your funeral and then being disappointed to learn that you are alive. During the rite, you sit up in your coffin and sing an aria. (Suppose the aria is not subject to copyright.) Would there be legal consequences? (A character in a certain novel claimed to have done this. I think he said the aria was from the opera Jesse James. I don't think that opera exists in reality.)
I'll use Wisconsin as a jurisdiction. If you file a false death certificate, that's a felony. But you probably wouldn't go that far. It could be disorderly conduct. In Wisconsin disorderly conduct is described as follows: Whoever, in a public or private place, engages in violent, abusive, indecent, profane, boisterous, unreasonably loud or otherwise disorderly conduct under circumstances in which the conduct tends to cause or provoke a disturbance is guilty of a Class B misdemeanor. There's also a statute prohibiting "Disrupting a funeral or memorial service" but it won't apply in this case unless disorderly conduct applies. It would raise the penalty to a class A misdemeanor (or a class I felony if you somehow did it again after being convicted once.) On the civil side, there could be an action for intentional infliction of emotional distress, either for the false report of your death, or for a "corpse" suddenly coming to life. This kind of lawsuit requires "extreme and outrageous conduct", but if this isn't, I don't know what would be.
I can’t think of any laws against pretending to commit a crime, per se. For example, undercover police officers often pretend to buy or sell illicit goods, to see who will take them up on the offer. However, pretending to commit some crimes could be a crime. if you intentionally pretend to be violent or unstable, and this “puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact,” that could be common assault.
§145d StGB makes it illegal to pretend that a crime did happen or will happen, but only if one deceives the police or a similar agency. It is also a crime to deceive about the participants of a crime. Pretending to have been sentenced and presumably to have been released after serving a sentence does not quite fit that law.
Here's where you went wrong legally: Suppose I legally obtain some digital image created by somebody else (e.g., by downloading from a public website). That, right there, is copyright infringement- unless the copyright owner has granted permission or the image is public domain you cannot copy it - this breaches "the right to make reproductions". By posting it on the web (assuming that it isn't itself an infringing copy) they have given implied permission for you to look at it in a web browser but not to copy it into a presentation even if that presentation is never presented. If it is presented then that makes the infringement worse - it adds breaches of "the right to communicate to the public" and "the right to use the work as a basis for an audiovisual work". How is this different from the computer wallpaper? It isn't. If you are using the one of the defaults that shipped with the OS then the license gives you permission. If you are using someone else's copyright without permission then it's a breach. There are defenses to copyright infringement but these are quite nationally variable - search this or other sites for "fair dealing" and "fair use".
The site's owners would likely be immune from any civil action based on its users' conduct, under Section 230(c)(1) of the Communications Decency Act: No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. The users, though, could still face liability. Although it would be libel rather than slander (because it is published rather than spoken), any damaging falsehoods could be actionable. The emotional distress component would also be a possibility, but it would probably be a tougher case. The laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but generally speaking an emotional-distress case requires really outrageous behavior and and very serious emotional damage.
Definitions A brand name is not a &quot;character&quot;. Neither is a real person, unless that person is being used as a character in a work of fiction. I will answer what I think the question intends. One can't really parody a real person, but one can use a person fictitiously. I am using here a narrow definition of &quot;parody&quot;, that one parodies a work by imitating it so as to comment on it, often but not always negatively. I exclude from &quot;parody&quot;: cases where the events of a work are imitated to tell a different story, or the same story in a different setting -- that is &quot;retelling&quot;. (West Side Story is a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, not a parody, in this sense.) I also exclude cases where the form or style of a work is imitated to make a different point, or for general humorous effect. That would be satire but not parody. I am using this narrow sense of parody because it is my understanding that only parody in the narrow sense has been held to be fair use. Satire or retelling is not generally fair use under US law, at least not because of the satire or retelling. Copyright The US Supreme Court has held in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569 (1994) that a commercial parody can be a fair use. The US Eleventh Circuit court extended this holding to novels in Suntrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin Co., 268 F.3d 1257 (11th Cir. 2001), in which it held that Alice Randall's 2001 parody, The Wind Done Gone, was not an infringement of Gone with the Wind But it is important to note that the definition of &quot;parody&quot; used in those cases is significantly more limited than the use sometimes made of the term in artistic circles or by average people. The courts held that a parody was fair use specifically because it commented on the original. A reworking of a story which did not particularly comment on the original, such as West Side Story based on Romeo and Juliet would not be fair use, at least not because it was a reworking/parody. (Of course Shakespeare is not protected by modern copyright, but if it were, West Side Story might be an infringement.) The use of the name or description of a real person in a work of fiction would not be an infringement of copyright, as no copyright covers a real person. Trademark Use of a variant of a protected trademark in such a way that reasonable consumers might be confused into thinking that it was created, approved, endorsed or sponsored by the trademark holder would normally be a trademark infringement. On the other hand a trademark may be used to talk about a product, using the trademark as the name of the product. This is known as nominative use. Thus a character in a book or movie could say &quot;I bought a Ford&quot; or &quot;I looked it up on Google&quot; and it would not be trademark infringement, usually. However, authors and particularly movie-makers do not want to risk a possibly expensive trademark suit and so they often invent product names to avoid any possible risk of trademark infringement claims. The names of people are less often protected than trademarks, although some are. Some fictional characters have their names or images protected as trademarks, but most do not. Use of the name of a real person could not be trademark infringement, unless that person's name was a protected trademark (rare but it sometimes happens). Even then, use would probably be nominative use unless the public would be likely to be confused into thinking that the person had approved or endorsed the work. Defamation If a person is used as a character in a work of fiction, and the character is portrayed in a negative way, this might give rise to a claim for defamation. For that claim to hold up, reasonable people would have to think that the description in the work of fiction also applies to the actual person. The work would have to make false factual statements about the person, that harmed the person's reputation. If the suit were in the US, and the person defamed was a public official or a public figure, the plaintiff would have to prove actual malice. That means proof that statements of fact were made knowing that they were false, or with reckless indifference to the truth. Proof of actual malice is often hard to obtain. Note that a work of fiction can be defamatory if a person is readily recognized, even if the name and some details were changed. For example the movie Citizen Kane was clearly based on the life of William Randolph Hearst, and Hearst is said to have considered a defamation action.
The reason is 17 USC 106: the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following... (2) to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work The original picture is the underlying protected work. The ASCII reproduction is a derivative work. If you get permission to make the derivative work, it is okay. Otherwise, it is copyright infringement. There is an escape clause, "fair use", which amounts to taking a chance that you won't be sued and then arguing that you didn't do them any prohibited harm. If you make any money off of the game, you have a major strike against you. I suggest reading the fair use FAQ; basically, it is really hard to know how a fair use defense will fare, but based on prior cases, I'd say it's infringement, not fair use.
Some people seem to believe that just because something happens 'in the internet' it is somehow outside normal jurisdictions. Wrong. In may be harder to investigate and prosecute crimes in the internet, but the laws apply all the same. There are some problems when it is unclear 'where in the world' something did happen -- in the jurisdiction of the perpetrator, the victim, or the service provider? But problems of jurisdiction apply e.g. to international fraud cases in the non-web-world as well. In many jurisdictions, the informed and voluntary consent makes some things legal which would otherwise be illegal. For instance, if two boxers get into the ring, it is understood that each of them did consent to be hit by the other. But usually two fighters could not legally agree to a fight to the death, because even if there are laws on assisted suicide, they do not apply to a fight. Insults, libel, and slander are not on the same level as homicide. There are jurisdictions where they are not prosecuted without the request of the victim. But an insult might also violate other laws, e.g. disturbing the peace. So don't bet on such an app unless you know for sure which jurisdictions are involved.