personality rights – Kelsey Farish

Fame and fortune: how do celebrities protect their image?

Famous movie stars and athletes earn big bucks beyond their day job at the studio or stadium. Their image can be used to in a variety of commercial contexts, ranging from endorsements and sponsorships, to merchandising and deals with fashion brands and magazines. Marketwatch reports that on average, signing a celebrity correlates to a rise in share prices, and a 4% increase in sales. After Chanel signed Nicole Kidman in 2003 to promote their N°5 perfume, global sales of the fragrance increased by 30%.

Celebrities today spend a huge amount of time and energy developing and maintaining their public image. But here in the United Kingdom, “image rights” have never been clearly stated in law. So how do celebrities protect and control the publicity associated with their name, image, and brand?

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Reputation: Taylor Swift’s protections under American and English defamation law

this post is featured on the University of the Arts London’s intellectual property blog, creativeIP.org

♫♬ Now we’ve got problems / and I don’t think we can solve them (without lawyers…)

The right to freedom of expression is not an absolute right: there are certain restrictions in place to protect an individual’s reputation. But those restrictions vary significantly, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. Considering the shared legal traditions of the United States and Great Britain, their differences on the issue of free speech is surprising.

In early September, PopFront published an article entitled “Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation.” Exploring the singer’s (somewhat convoluted, if not contrived) connections to the American alt-right, PopFront suggests Swift’s song “Look What You Made Me Do” resonates with Breitbart readers, Trump supporters, and white supremacists, et al. The article also shows a screenshot from Swift’s music video juxtaposed with a photo of Hitler, noting that “Taylor lords over an army of models from a podium, akin to what Hitler had in Nazi Germany.”

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