Time for Your Close-up: The Right of Publicity in the Social Media Era

Maintaining the cachet of a celebrity’s brand requires savvy management of endorsements. It also requires vigilance in preventing the brand from being exploited, because the unauthorized commercial use of name or likeness deprives the celebrity of compensation and potentially tarnishes his or her brand value.

This article examines a number of lawsuits in recent years that have raised common law and statutory right of publicity theories to attempt to prevent social media sites from turning use of those platforms into unauthorized endorsements.