The Commercial Appropriation of Personality

Commercial exploitation of attributes of an individual''s personality such as name voice and likeness forms a mainstay of modern advertising and marketing. Such indicia also represent an important aspect of an individual''s dignity which is often offended by unauthorized commercial appropriation. This volume provides a framework for analysing the disparate aspects of the problem of commercial appropriation of personality and traces in detail the discrete patterns of development in the major common law systems. It also considers whether a coherent justification for a remedy may be identified from a range of competing theories. The considerable variation in substantive legal protection reflects more fundamental differences in the law''s responsiveness to commercial practices and different attitudes towards the proper scope and limits of intangible property rights.