Governance, Policy & LawGenerative MediaSociety, Ethics & Economy

right of publicity

nounAlso: publicity rights, personality rights, name, image and likeness, NIL rights, likeness rights

In plain wordsA person's legal power to decide whether businesses may use their name, face, voice or other recognizable traits to sell things, and to be paid when they do. AI's skill at copying voices and faces makes it more important.

A legal right, found mainly in US state law, to stop others from trading on one's identity — putting one's voice, signature, photograph, name, likeness or other recognizable traits to work in advertising or merchandise without consent — and to recover damages when they do. Most states recognize it by statute or common law, and some protect it after death, in Indiana for 100 years. Courts have applied it to imitations as well as copies, as when singers won damages over sound-alike voices in advertisements (Midler v. Ford, 1988; Waits v. Frito-Lay, 1992). Generative AI has made it central to disputes over voice cloningvoice cloning, n.: Using AI to copy a specific person's voice from recordings, so a computer can say new things that sound like them — useful for dubbing and accessibility, and abused in scams. and digital replicasdigital replica, n.: A realistic computer-made copy of a real person's voice or appearance — such as an AI clone of a singer's voice or a digital stand-in for an actor — that can say or do things the person never did.: Tennessee's ELVIS Act (2024) explicitly protects voice and reaches tools built to imitate it, California and New York regulate replicas of performers, and the proposed federal NO FAKES ActNO FAKES Act, prop. n.: A proposed US law that would let people control AI-made copies of their voice and face, and would require websites to take down unauthorized fakes once notified. would create a national right. Elsewhere, comparable protection comes from personality rights, privacy, passing-off and data protectiondata protection, n.: Laws and practices that control how organizations collect, use, store and share information about people, and that give people rights over it, such as seeing it or having it deleted. law.
The voice actor's suit claims the cloned voice in the ad violates her right of publicity.

Origin

Named by Judge Jerome Frank in Haelan Laboratories v. Topps Chewing Gum (US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 1953), which recognized a transferable right in a baseball player's photograph, and elaborated by Melville Nimmer in a 1954 law-review article. The US Supreme Court has addressed it once, in Zacchini v. Scripps-Howard Broadcasting (1977).

Usage note

Distinct from copyright, which protects works rather than people — a voice or a style cannot be copyrighted — and from defamation and privacy torts, which address falsity and intrusion rather than commercial appropriation.

Sources

Nimmer, M. B. (1954). The Right of Publicity. Law and Contemporary Problems 19(2).
Rothman, J. E. (2018). The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World. Harvard University Press.

Defined in law or standards

California Civil Code §3344; New York Civil Rights Law §§50–51; Tennessee Personal Rights Protection Act, as amended by the ELVIS Act (2024)

Mentioned in

NO FAKES ActNO FAKES Act, prop. n.: A proposed US law that would let people control AI-made copies of their voice and face, and would require websites to take down unauthorized fakes once notified.