Publicity Rights And Its Scope In Intellectual Property Laws

Since the past few years, publicity rights have attracted considerable amount of recognition in the field of intellectual property laws. These rights sometimes also referred to as celebrity rights are rights associated with the personality of an individual. They can be defined as an individual's right to control the commercial use of his or her identity. The public image of a celebrity is of immense value and involves tremendous amount of money. Thus, it becomes important for such a person to protect his right so that nobody else exploits it or acquires unauthorized gains from it. In this article, a modest endeavor is made to understand the scope of protecting these rights under intellectual property laws in India along with the laws prevalent in the United States of America and United Kingdom.