On The Subjects Of The Commercial Personality Rights And Its Protect

With the socio-economic development, technology progress and the mediaindustry prosperous, increasing is the phenomenon of commercial use of the name ofa natural person, portrait, the overall image, corporate name, credit, trade secrets andetc. In judicial area, the case which is related to the merchandising of personalityinterests is growing, but trial for such case has been stuck in trouble. The reason liesin that a) the personality rights and property rights has been considered to be entirelydifferent and b) their corresponding legal system is independent and unrelated, whichinevitably make it impossible to take into consideration a variety of interests duringthe commercialization process of personality rights while applying the existing lawsto disputes. The routine operation of such cases in practice is conducted a) partlythrough civil law, b) partly through intellectual property law, or c) partly throughcompetition law, which causes the merchandising personality rights to be reluctantlyclassified into the existing type of rights. Based on such situation, this paper discussesand analyzes the status quo of merchandising of personality rights and the necessity ofconstruction such rights, and puts forward relevant proposals.This paper is divided into introduction, body and epilogue, and the body containsfour chapters. The first chapter is an overview of commercial personality rights, ofwhich, section I, taking personality rights as a starting point, briefly states the systemof personality rights, analyzes two sets of interests in personality—the interests of dignity and the interests of property, and on this basis discusses the relationshipbetween personality rights and property rights as well as the nature of the new type ofpersonality rights, and finally proposes the perspective of commercial personalityrights which should be defined as business rights. Section II from the comparativelaw’s angle investigates the status quo of merchandising of personality rights,emphatically introduces the publicity rights system in American law and the generalpersonality rights system in German law, through these distinct and typical legislationin two law systems of merchandising personality rights system to further understandthis system and to learn from it. The second chapter, from the angle of type of subjectsof commercial personality rights, details the concept and its conservation status ofpersonality logo of a natural person, trade names, goodwill, credit and others. Thethird chapter mainly introduces legal protection of and its deficiency in commercialpersonality rights in China, including civil law, intellectual property law andcompetition law. The final chapter proposes the construction of the system ofcommercial personality rights, as well as the establishment of the general personalityrights system in the business law, and at the same time puts forward the ideas andmethods of civil law protection and the system of specific personality rights toprovide a reference for China. The epilogue highlights the content of this paper andreiterates the significance of construction of the system of commercial personalityrights.