Subjects:

Intellectual Property Law

Contents:

Part I. A Framework:
1. The problem of appropriation of personality

Part II. Economic Interests and the Law of Unfair Competition:
2. Introduction

3. Statutory and extra-legal remedies

4. Goodwill in personality: the tort of passing off in English and Australian law

5. Unfair competition and the doctrine of misappropriation

Part III. Dignitary Interests:
6. Introduction

7. Privacy and publicity in the United States

8. Privacy interests in English law

9. Interests in reputation

Part IV. Pervasive Problems:
10. Property in personality

11. Justifying a remedy for appropriation of personality

Part V. Conclusions:
12. The autonomy of appropriation of personality.

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 unauthorised 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 new 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 new commercial practices and different attitudes towards the proper scope and limits of intangible property rights.