Discussion On The Legal Protection Of Real Figure’s Publicity Right

In modern society, using the value of real figure’s identities for commercial activities have become one of the primary means of increasing the sales. The income of persons, especially the celebrities, which obtained by the commercial use of their identities, become increasingly higher in the share of his or her total incomes, yet unauthorized commercial use of the identities would bring more loss on the negative side. However because of lacking legal protection of the value of real figure’s identities in our state, how to protect such property becomes an urgent research topic to the law. Setting foreign legislative experience as the mature pattern and combining with domestic and foreign-related practical and theoretical research results, This paper is trying to prove the reasonableness and feasibility of the right of publicity to protect the value of the real figure’s identities.This article has four chapters. Chapter I analyses the weakness of legal protection about the value of identities provided by the current legislation in our state, then questions that if there is any necessity to set the publicity right to protect the value of identities specifically. Provided by current law, the protection of identities depends on the personality right, copyright, trademark, anti-unfair competition that belonged to different fields. But when confronted with using or imitating other person’s identities even such cross-protection can not handle all the problems and have controversies, such as the case of Michael Jordan and Teresa Teng, showed in the court that it is hard to fulfill the interests of person’s publicity right effectively. In conclusion, establishing the right of publicity brings benefits cause it will provide the systematic legal protection.Chapter II proposes the publicity right formally with introducing its concept, origin and development. Compared with the opinions of domestic and foreign professors, this paper defines the publicity right as a legal right that can help people to control the commercial use of their identities, which contained not only the image, name but also included the voice, style and other personal elements which can directly point to a real figure. The theoretical basis of the publicity right can be combined with the labor theory of property, unjust enrichment theory and the theory of economic incentives, taking the advantages of the three theories and exploring in different respects would help to understand the publicity right.Chapter III describes three distinct specific protection models for identities, namely binary system of the United States, passing-off system of the United Kingdom and personality rights protection system of German. The lack of completely protection model makes the transplant of foreign mature legal experience become more and more important. Deeply research of these three models combining with the basis of theoretical and practical background will be beneficial to establishing our own publicity right for adjusting to the native circumstances.The final chapter is looking forward to improving the right of publicity specifically. Combined with the model of the United States and German, this paper chooses to put the publicity right and personality right in parallel by using the right of personality to protect the spiritual interests, while the right of publicity is focusing on the property sides, and also makes a specific description of the contents, limits and remedies of publicity right.