This looseleaf treatise examines the inherent rights of individuals to control the commercial use of their identities. Trademarks, copyrights, false advertising, defamation, infliction of mental distress, interference with contract, licenses, and other aspects of publicity and privacy are discussed in the work.

This book is a practical guide to the drafting and protection of commercial agreements in the UK. It is the first book on the market to draw together the different strands of the law, including privacy, defamation, broadcasting rights, sponsorship, and merchandising. Analysis of the law is supplemented with precedent contractual agreements and injunctions enabling practitioners to respond quickly to their clients' needs. Article 8 of the European Court of Human Rights protects an individual's right to privacy, however, in the UK, this is particularly difficult to implement due to the lack of legislation in this area. Privacy law has developed as a result of several important cases over the past few years, such as Campbell v Mirror Group Newspapers, Douglas v Hello, and, most recently, the litigation involving Max Moseley. This book reviews each of these cases and explains the current situation regarding UK privacy law. Drawn from the Bar and the Press Complaints Commission, the team of authors is uniquely placed to give an insight into this increasingly complex and important area of law, to provide practical advice for practitioners who represent 'celebrity' clients. For anyone in the public eye whose image and reputation is their biggest commercial asset, they need to be able to protect this reputation and preserve their right to privacy while exploiting their image for commercial gain. When an individual's rights are violated, practitioners are frequently called upon to seek appropriate redress. This book suitably equips the practitioner to represent such clients and includes useful precedent contracts, injunctions, and claim documents on an accompanying CD-ROM.

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.

An impressive team of 39 authors have contributed to this unique overview of the laws relating to privacy, publicity & personality in 29 countries. For guidance on these issues & the relevant application of the law in differing jurisdictions this book provides invaluable comparisons, outlining the terms of current initiatives, the areas in which change is anticipated & covering the Data Protection Act 1998 & the Human Rights Act 1998 in the UK. The book covers a vast range of issues, from covert filming to recording of conversations, & from sifting of rubbish through to security camera footage & trade mark infringement, ensuring that whatever topic is of interest, this book has it covered.

Reproduction of the original: The Right to Privacy by Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis

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.

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.