Real Characters Right

When the image of a famous person is merchandised, there comes the right of publicity. The right of publicity was studied very early in America, and lots of states had enacted laws and statues about it. But in our country, the right of publicity is not a legal concept but a theoretical concept. The right of publicity should include three types of right, i.e.the right of publicity of real person, the right of publicity of fictional character and the right of publicity of social organization. The concept of the right of publicity was proposed basing on the daily diversification of the forms of publicity merchanding and infringement, besides the defects of the current legal system.Especially, when protecting the merchandised real person's publicity; both the present personality right system and property right system have lots of difficulties. This paper takes the right of publicity of real person as the research object, using the comparative analytic method and semantic analytic method, combining the domestic and international newest cases, drawing lessons from the domestic and international scholar's existing research results, to prove the necessity and meaning of setting up the independent right of publicity of real person. This paper attempts to found a new kind of right, namely the right of publicity of real person, to promote the abundant legal protection of the real person's image interests.There are six major chapters together.The Introduction is the first chapter, which analyzed the era background of turbulent merchandising tide. Under this background, the publicity exploitation has become an important developing industry. There are three types of publicity, i.e.publicity of real person, publicity of fictional character, publicity of social organization. But considering the length, the centralized contradiction and the domestic research status quo, what falls into the scope of this paper is only the publicity of real person, namely the vivid character which is demonstrated through the name, the portrait, the sound and other vivid factors.Chapter Two is one of the focal points in this paper, which analyzed the theory flaw of the Personality right-Property right dichotomy theory when protecting the merchandised real person's publicity.Personality right law could be a first alternative to regulate publicity merchandising. But to safeguard the mental interests of citizens and legal persons, personality right could only passively provide pecuniary remedies to property damage when personality is infringed, so personality right could not be separated with its'subject, it couldn't be transferred to other persons or be abandoned, also it can't provide the protection of the person's similar image. In contrast, the right of publicity could stimulate people to take...