Commercial exploitation of attributes of an individual's personality, such as name, voice and likeness, forms a mainstay of modern advertising and marketing. Such indicia also represent an important aspect of an individual's dignity which is often offended by unauthorized commercial appropriation. This volume provides a framework for analysing the disparate aspects of the problem of commercial appropriation of personality and traces, in detail, the discrete patterns of development in the major common law systems. It also considers whether a coherent justification for a remedy may be identified from a range of competing theories. The considerable variation in substantive legal protection reflects more fundamental differences in the law's responsiveness to commercial practices and different attitudes towards the proper scope and limits of intangible property rights.

Beverley-Smith provides analyses of the disparate aspects of commercial appropriation of personality and traces, in detail, the discrete patterns of development in the major common law systems. He also considers whether a coherent justification for a new remedy may be identified from a range of competing theories.

9.1 A Pragmatic Cultural Framework for Legal Analysis -- 9.2 Concluding Remarks -- Bibliography -- Index

The protection of privacy and personality is one of the most fascinating issues confronting any legal system. This book provides a detailed comparative analysis of intellectual property rights in an individual's name, voice or likeness in the major legal systems : France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Who controls how one’s identity is used by others? This legal question, centuries old, demands greater scrutiny in the Internet age. Jennifer Rothman uses the right of publicity—a little-known law, often wielded by celebrities—to answer that question, not just for the famous but for everyone. In challenging the conventional story of the right of publicity’s emergence, development, and justifications, Rothman shows how it transformed people into intellectual property, leading to a bizarre world in which you can lose ownership of your own identity. This shift and the right’s subsequent expansion undermine individual liberty and privacy, restrict free speech, and suppress artistic works. The Right of Publicity traces the right’s origins back to the emergence of the right of privacy in the late 1800s. The central impetus for the adoption of privacy laws was to protect people from “wrongful publicity.” This privacy-based protection was not limited to anonymous private citizens but applied to famous actors, athletes, and politicians. Beginning in the 1950s, the right transformed into a fully transferable intellectual property right, generating a host of legal disputes, from control of dead celebrities like Prince, to the use of student athletes’ images by the NCAA, to lawsuits by users of Facebook and victims of revenge porn. The right of publicity has lost its way. Rothman proposes returning the right to its origins and in the process reclaiming privacy for a public world.

This book encourages a cultural understanding of the contemporary celebrity and analyses the laws governing the commercial appropriation of fame.

Celebrities can sell anything from cars to clothing, and we are constantly fascinated by their influence over our lifestyle choices. This book makes an important contribution to legal scholarship about the laws governing the commercial appropriation of fame. Exploring the right of publicity in the US and the passing off action in the UK and Australia, David Tan demonstrates how an appreciation of the production, circulation and consumption of fame can be incorporated into a pragmatic framework to further the understanding of the laws protecting the commercial value of the celebrity personality. Using contemporary examples such as social media and appropriation art, Tan shows how present challenges for the law may be addressed using this cultural framework. This book will be of interest to intellectual property law academics, judges, practitioners and students in the US and common law jurisdictions, as well as those in the field of cultural studies.