Tag Archives: misappropriation of a name or likeness

“A Gronking To Remember” Plaintiffs Lose Right Of Publicity Appeal

For those of you in desperate need of Christmas present ideas for a New England Patriots fan, you can rest assured that your ironic backup option – a copy of the romance novel, A Gronking to Remember – is still available for sale. Truth be told, the self-published volume was not in serious danger of becoming unavailable, but the recent Sixth Circuit opinion in Roe v.… More

Authorship Credit for Scholarly and Creative Works: The Elusive American Attribution Right

creditWhat if were to tell you that I jointly authored this article with a colleague, but that I’m not going to give her any credit or attribution because I don’t feel like it? Can she sue me for copyright infringement? No, because we are joint authors, so I have as much a right to publish this article as she does. If we lived in Europe, my colleague might have relied on her inherent right of attribution,… More

Privacy or Property? Arizona Court Adopts Post-Mortem Right of Publicity In Intra-Family Online Dispute

The right of publicity, i.e., the right not to have others appropriate your name or image for commercial purposes, is an odd duck.  It was described by Professor Prosser in 1960, and later in the Restatement of Torts, as of one of four species of common law privacy rights intended to remedy the emotional injury to one’s “seclusion” caused by breaches of privacy. By contrast, the Third Restatement of Unfair Competition in 1995,… More

Can Private Photos Be Used In Political Ads Without Permission? Colorado Court Rejects Gay Couple’s Misappropriation Claim; Copyright Claim Survives

Capture

When we upload family pictures to the internet, we understand that, in theory, anyone in the world might download them and use them for some nefarious purpose.  However, we usually take comfort in the fact that most of us just aren’t interesting enough to be noticed. But that wasn’t the case for New Jersey couple Brian Edwards and Thomas Privitere.

In 2010,… More