Celebrities Need Their Privacy

One particularity of the human animal that differentiates him from others species is his capacity to recognize his own image, and even to become quite infatuated with it, with perhaps some exceptions. We also like to collect images of celebrities, a mere piece of paper being enough sometimes for a teenager to fall in love with an actor. A teenager Judy Garland did just so, declaring her love for Clark Gable singing “You Made Me Love You”, while clutching a picture of the MGM star.

Does the public have a right to know everything about its favorite celebrities? Specialists are making a living following the rich and famous around the globe, capturing pictures from a distance using telescopic photo-lenses, or trespassing a private event, as in the Douglas v. Hello case, EWCA Civ 595 (2004). What distinguishes the celebrities from mere mortals is the fact that their pictures have a commercial value that may pass six-figures, whereas we bore our friends with the slides taken during our last cruise. However, people who are not famous do also have a right to publicity, at least under California law, KNB Enterprises v. Matthews, 78 Cal. App. 4th 362, 367 (2000): “Although the unauthorized appropriation of an obscure plaintiff's name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness would not inflict as great an economic injury as would be suffered by a celebrity plaintiff, California's appropriation statute is not limited to celebrity plaintiffs.”