On The Image Of The Right

The modern society is commercialized, and anything can be branded with the mark "Commodity", therefore a celebrity's identity is commercialized inevitably. Some law scholars proposed "Right of Publicity" to protect a celebrity's economic benefit. The right of publicity is defined as a celebrity's right to control and profit from the commercial use of his/her name, likeness and other identities, and the right is kind of property rights, it's assignable and descendible.The right of publicity initially emerged in America. With the great development in advertising and the rise of "celebrity industry" towards the closing decades of the nineteenth century, celebrity itself had become a source of immense economic value. Many celebrities came to the courts seeking relief from commercial appropriation. At first, American courts held the unauthorized use of a person's likeness for commercial purpose actionable as an invasion of privacy. A right of privacy, as a purely personal right, however was neither descendible nor assignable. Understandably, privacy theory proved a less than perfect vehicle for celebrities eager to extract the maximum possible benefit from their publicity values. The privacy theory could not meet the need of commercial practice, too. As a result, the right of publicity came into being. Since Judge Jerome Frank proposed "Right of Publicity" in 1953, twenty-eight states have provided their citizens with a remedy for infringement of the right of publicity. More and more law scholars have called for a federal right of publicity to resolve many issues raised by the patchwork of state publicity laws recently, besides which, some courts in Australia and Canada have begun to use the theory to resolve the issues.The traditional system of rights is challenged by the theory of the right of publicity. Manu law scholars criticized the reasonability of the theory, but some scholars have advanced several reasons in support of the right of publicity, including: the Fruits of Labor theory, the Economic Incentives theory and the Protecting Consumers theory. I think that the Fruits of Labor theory can explain the property's attribute of the right of publicity; therefore the theory is more reasonable.According to the Fruits of Labor theory, the right of publicity is a kind of...