a) it is a trademark of yours
b) you can own a name in specific connection with a very distinct character concept, but that ownership is then severed when the name is applied to a wholly distinct character concept
c) you can declare ownership over a collection of creatively chosen and ordered names, but that copyright extends only to the collection as a mass and provides no copyright protection to an individual name or two which is borrowed. The barriers to copyrighting a collection are necessarily high, so that I cannot declare copyright over a collection of the 12 most common greek god names. That's more of an observation than a creative selection, and it would be against the public interest as it would disallow me from writing about the Greek gods as soon as any other person has written about them.
The PI definition allows for the PI'ing of character names, but requires ownership for PI declaration. Thus, in my mind, PI declarations of names as PI only provides narrow protection for non trademarks as noted above.
I think the controlling case law on these issues are those cases concerning copyrightability of phone books and the copyrightability of recipe books.
IANAL
YMMV
Lee
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