Protecting image rights in the face of digitalization: A United States and European analysis

Abstract

The star of the movie "Rebel without a Cause," James Dean, died in 1955. Yet the latest film he will officially be credited in, dates back to no sooner than 2020. Indeed, the movie "Finding Jack" will incorporate a hologram of James Dean, resurrected from the dead to play a character in this brand new performance under his name. This does not represent an exceptional singular case however. Technology is advancing at a drastic pace; which legislation sometimes struggles to keep up with. The novel ways of digitally reproducing human beings have brought along with them serious questions concerning Personality Rights protection. These rights diverge considerably from one jurisdiction to another, on a variety of topics such as the acknowledgement of posthumous protection or the scope of the right to privacy versus publicity rights, for example. This paper offers an evaluation of these rights, based on a comparative analysis across different civil and common law countries, which will hopefully provide an insight into how image rights are being safeguarded at present. The paper concludes proposing a potential future framework to ensure personality right protection in an increasingly digitized world.

A face of one’s own: The role of an online personae in a digital age and the right to control one’s own online personae in the presence of digital hacking

“…Recent statistics provided by Google show that defamation and impersonation are the most important reasons for requests for content removal in the US and India (Google, 2022 , 2023 ). Another is the platforms’ creation of echo chambers and satisfaction bubbles in social media, feeding users content that will produce strong emotional responses, regardless of accuracy, euphemistically called “increasing the quality of the user experience.” With new techniques, for example, deepfakes, over-dubbing, voice cloning, web browser manipulation, internet bots, natural language processing, generative pre-trained transformers, or manipulation of social media profiles and Wikipedia articles, any online personae can be credibly recreated in an artificial context that appears to depict someone, although it is not (Chesney & Citron, 2019 ; Harris, 2019 ; Heugas, 2021 ; Kietzmann et al, 2020 ; O'Connell, 2020 ).…”