Document Type
Article
Publication Date
4-2019
Abstract
The Article is adapted from a keynote lecture about my book, THE RIGHT OF PUBLICITY: PRIVACY REIMAGINED FOR A PUBLIC WORLD (Harvard Univ. Press 2018), delivered at Columbia Law School for its symposium, “Owning Personality: The Expanding Right of Publicity.” The book challenges the conventional historical and theoretical understanding of the right of publicity. By uncovering the history of the right of publicity’s development, the book reveals solutions to current clashes with free speech, individual liberty, and copyright law, as well as some opportunities for better protecting privacy in the digital age.
The lecture (as adapted for this Article) explores in greater depth one major theme drawn from the book ― the right of publicity’s turn in the late 1970s from being a personal right rooted in an individual to being an intellectual property right separable from the underlying identity-holder. This transformation of people into a form of intellectual property has led to significant expansions in the reach and scope of right of publicity laws across the country. At the same time, treating the right of publicity as IP has undermined First Amendment and copyright-based limits on these laws, and jeopardized the freedom of the very identity-holders upon whose interests the right is justified. The Article considers not only whether the IP rubric is appropriate for the right of publicity, but also whether the challenges posed by right of publicity laws are a magnified version of more general problems that IP laws face today ― in particular, the continued expansion of these rights unmoored from the initial justifications for the entitlements, and without adequate protections for socially valuable uses.
Keywords
right of publicity, right of privacy, right to privacy, intellectual property, transferability, alienability, First Amendment, property, torts, legal history, Erie doctrine, Haelan Labs. v. Topps Chewing Gum, Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting, legislation, postmortem, wills and trusts, tax
Publication Title
Columbia Journal of Law & Arts
Repository Citation
Rothman, Jennifer E., "The Right of Publicity's Intellectual Property Turn" (2019). All Faculty Scholarship. 2377.
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/faculty_scholarship/2377
Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, First Amendment Commons, Intellectual Property Law Commons, Privacy Law Commons, Property Law and Real Estate Commons, Torts Commons
Publication Citation
42 Colum. J.L. & Arts 277 (2019).