Shozoken in America

[Nornes, Markus]

I just listened to the January 13 podcast for NPR's On the Media, primarily for it's charming story on Mitt strapping his dog to the top of the family car for a road trip. But there was another story on shozoken in US law. This inspired by the Chinese Steve Jobs doll that Apple was trying to quash.   Here it seems to be called personality rights. According to the experts they interview, this goes back to the fifties or so when famous people started using law to protect their privacy. It gradually morphed to convert personality to property. 

But here's the interesting part. Personality rights are part of neither federal law or international copyright treaties. It is applied state by state. Not surprisingly, California has fairly strong laws on the books. But if the exploitation was coming out of a state with less celebrities, there are no provisions for shozoken. 

On top of this, most of these laws do not provide for postmortem rights, since they were initially about protecting the privacy of the living. (Both of these aspects probably explain why Apple made a lot of scary noise about that doll but didn't actually file a suit.)

In any case, this would seem to clear the way for ignoring shozoken claims when publishing in (Most of? Not UC Press?!?) the US. Of course, it's ultimately hard to say without actual legal advice. 

Podcast at NPR.org

Markus




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