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.

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

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.

Dealing with rights and developments at the margin of classic intellectual property, this fascinating book explores emerging types of regulations and how existing IP regimes inform and influence the judicial and legislative creation of 'substitute' IP rights. The editors have carefully structured the book to ensure that there is a thorough analysis of how commercial values arising at the margins of classic IP rights are regulated. As new regimes of regulations emerge, the question of how existing IP regimes inform and influence the judicial and legislative creation of 'substitute' intellectual property rights is explored. By doing this, the contributors interrogate the very boundaries that constitute what IP rights traditionally protect and cover. Should all investments in anything intangible and 'intellectual' - such as product shapes, personality, data and organization of an event - be protected as property? Should there be qualitative differences among the types of investments and achievements? These are just some of the interesting questions addressed in this important new book. Academics, policymakers, lawyers and many others concerned with IP rights, will benefit from the extensive and thoughtful discussion presented in this work. Contributors T. Aplin, S. Ericsson, J. Griffiths, A. Kur, N. Lee, S. Maniatis, A. Ohly, A. Quaedvlieg, G. Rinkerman, K. Schmitt, Y. Tamura, N. van der Laan, G. Westkamp

Information and knowledge have become crucial factors in modern labour markets. In this context, labour-management relations are characterised by an increasing and considerable flow of information. These developments are influenced by new management techniques, such as human resources management, in which the individual is identified as a key element in business success. Furthermore, there is the globalisation of the economy, the increase of international corporate mergers and the unfolding of the network society, which goes hand in hand with technological innovations. These developments not only multiplied the needs for information and the flow of data in employment relations, but also improved techniques of data processing revealing sensitive data of employees. This book deals with employment privacy law, a field of knowledge that increasingly gains influence in legal theory and daily practice. It concentrates on the legal regulation of general human resources data as well as sensitve data in the employment context. The book is developed within a comparative perspective, providing an overview and analysis of the Law of each Member State of the European Union in the field of study. It is completed by a comparative summary. Information and insights in this book will be of great value for practicing lawyers, human resources managers, academics, interest groups and policy makers. The specific issue of monitoring and surveillance in the workplace is covered in another highly recommended book.

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 the laws relating to commercial exploitation of personality in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. It examines the difficulties in reconciling privacy and personality with intellectual property rights in an individual's identity and in balancing such rights with the competing interests of freedom of expression and freedom of competition. This analysis will be useful for lawyers in legal systems which have yet to develop a sophisticated level of protection for interests in personality. Equally, lawyers in systems which provide a higher level of protection will benefit from the comparative insights into determining the nature and scope of intellectual property rights in personality, particularly questions relating to assignment, licensing, and post-mortem protection.

Daniel Solove presents a startling revelation of how digital dossiers are created, usually without the knowledge of the subject, & argues that we must rethink our understanding of what privacy is & what it means in the digital age before addressing the need to reform the laws that regulate it.