The Commercial Appropriation of Personality

Download or read book The Commercial Appropriation of Personality written by Huw Beverley-Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-08-15 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 unauthorized 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 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 commercial practices and different attitudes towards the proper scope and limits of intangible property rights.