Final Thoughts

AuthorWeston Anson
Pages239-246
239
I. Yesterday and Today
The subtitle of this book is “Analysis, Valuation, and Current Legal Status.” We spent
the first six chapters providing a condensed snapshot of where rights of publicity came
from and where it stands today—brilliant in its patchwork quilt of colors that rep-
resents the overlay of state statute, federal law, and state common law precedent. We
don’t need to revisit that. Second, we can all visualize part of what tomorrow brings:
constantly evolving innovation and technological change. One thing is certain in our
profession and that is this: the only thing that is constant is change. We can also see
Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, and all the others becoming a bigger part of
our life. Without question new media, new networks, and new delivery systems will
influence this right of publicity milieu in which we all have an interest. Virtual people
now walk among us acting and singing and dancing in virtual shows, and will soon be
offering virtual products (look no further than Pinterest). 3-D products, custom-made
and celebrity endorsed, will be delivered to everyone’s home in the near future. We can
all see these things coming. They are discussed in the second part of this chapter.
First, however, it is useful for us to focus on the last 25-plus years and some of
the key changes that have grown the right of publicity and expanded it along several
dimensions:
its parameters of usage
its protections
its participants
its form of usage
its expressions of usage
its audience
To do this, I want to take a look at ten milestones that perhaps have had the most
impact and see how we have come forward from the early beginnings.
A. Haelen and Zacchini
These two cases finally established right of publicity, and in fact finally coined the very
phrase “right of publicity,” in both law and commerce. Haelen grew out of the so-called
baseball card wars in the 1950s. In it the court found, once and for all, that a person has
a right in the publicity value of his photograph, and also has a right to grant the privilege
to publish that image to a third. Thus, not only was the right born, and the phrase born,
but the right to transfer that right and receive value for it was firmly established.
Final Thoughts
ans50153_16_ft_239-246.indd 239 3/23/15 10:44 AM

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