Personality Righs

“A key question underlying the protection of personality, and which to an extent explains the UK courts’ reluctance to embrace a fully-fledged personality right, lies in the justifications, or absence of justifications, for such protection. It is accepted that personality merchandising is a common feature of daily commercial life, and much money is made by individuals and organisations through these activities, but it does not thereby follow that the individual should be given an enforceable right in personality.”
(Hector MacQueen, Charlotte Waelde, Graeme Laurie & Abbe Brown, Contemporary Intellectual Property Law (2nd Edn, OUP 2010) 706

MODULE: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW 2
WORD COUNT: 3,867
INTRODUCTION
In the past decade the public have been faced with an uncontrolled mass-media explosion as not only a source for information, but for marketing, which in turn has created a celebrity phenomenon in which “Celebrities replaced the monarchy as the new symbols of recognition and belonging, and as the belief in God waned, celebrities become immortal.” Celebrities have become the central element of the marketing of a product, whether the marketing be that of print, audio, visual or the web, society is being bombarded with advertising or merchandising for a product. Modern marketing strategies are benefiting more and more economically from the positive images of celebrities, no matter whether they are a sports star, an actor or a musician.
Every day we are flooded with images of celebrities either promoting or endorsing products of all varieties, with anything from clothing to cleaning products and in recent years celebrities and sports people have progressively learnt the enormous economic value of their image and personality and how they can potentially be a lucrative source of income. Nowadays many companies recognise this ever appealing attractive force and use the celebrity as a commercial magnet as the celebrity works as “a powerful image of quality,...