Preface.

This book aims to investigate the way in which personality rights are protected in China through a comparative and cross-cultural lens drawing on perspectives from Europe and elsewhere in the world. Currently, the question whether or not to incorporate a special law on personal rights – the right to life, the right to health, and the rights to reputation and privacy – into a future Chinese Civil Code is heatedly debated in the Chinese legal community. The essential topics that are addressed in this book include general issues of personality rights, personality rights in Constitutional law, personality rights in private law, the legislative development of personality rights in China, case studies of the right to privacy, personality rights in the mass media and the internet, competition law aspects of the right of publicity, the protection of patients’ personal information, and personality rights in the family context. The book offers a broad investigation of personality rights protection in both China and Europe and provides the first substantive comparison of the Chinese and European regimes. The project is conceived as a joint effort on the part of a carefully chosen team of Chinese and European academics, working closely together. The team consists of both senior scholars and young researchers led by well-known experts in the field of comparative tort law.

Conflicts of laws arising from injuries to rights of personality—such as defamation or invasion of privacy—have always been difficult, if only because they implicate conflicting societal values about the rights of freedom of speech and access to information, on the one hand, and protection of reputation and privacy, on the other hand. The ubiquity of the internet has dramatically increased the frequency and intensity of these conflicts. This book explores the ways in which various Western countries have addressed these conflicts, but also advances new, practical ideas about how these conflicts should be resolved. These ideas are part of an international model law unanimously adopted by a Resolution of the Institut de droit international, which addresses jurisdiction, choice of law, and recognition and enforcement of foreign judgments. The book provides extensive article-by-article commentary, which explains the philosophy and intended operation of the Resolution.

European Convention on Human Rights – Article 10 – Freedom of expression 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises. 2. The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary. In the context of an effective democracy and respect for human rights mentioned in the Preamble to the European Convention on Human Rights, freedom of expression is not only important in its own right, but it also plays a central part in the protection of other rights under the Convention. Without a broad guarantee of the right to freedom of expression protected by independent and impartial courts, there is no free country, there is no democracy. This general proposition is undeniable. This handbook is a practical tool for legal professionals from Council of Europe member states who wish to strengthen their skills in applying the European Convention on Human Rights and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in their daily work.

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 volume provides a comprehensive analysis of civil liability for invasion of personality interests in Europe. It is the final product of the collaboration of twenty-seven scholars and includes case studies of fourteen European jurisdictions, as well as an introductory chapter written from a US perspective. The case studies focus in particular on the legal protection of honour and reputation, privacy, self-determination and image. This volume aims to detect hidden similarities (the 'common core') in the actual legal treatment accorded by different European countries to personal interests which in some of these countries qualify as 'personality rights', and also to detect hidden disparities in the 'law in action' of countries whose 'law in the books' seem to protect one and the same personality interest in the same way.

English summary: This volume contains the lectures given at an international conference on the subject of Invasions of Personal Privacy by the Media. The authors deal with the protection of the personality from the media in an analysis of the individual legal systems in the member states of the European Union, discussing this in detail from the perspective of scholarly and legal practice, history of the law, comparative law, conflict of laws and interdisciplinary aspects. The lectures pertain to basic issues in connection with the Caroline decision handed down by the German Federal Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, they present individual national laws, deal with the development of legal history as well as with general questions, interdisciplinary aspects and questions in regard to conflict of laws. German description: Dieses Buch ist aus der Tagung Verletzungen von Personlichkeitsrechten durch die Medien - Invasions of Personality Rights by the Media hervorgegangen, die im Mai 2004 in Greifswald stattfand. Das Ziel der Tagung war es, die Thematik umfassend in Auseinandersetzung mit den einzelnen Rechten von Mitgliedstaaten der EU zu behandeln und sich ihr gleichermassen aus wissenschaftlicher und praktischer, rechtshistorischer, rechtsvergleichender, kollisionsrechtlicher und interdisziplinarer Sicht zu stellen.