So it looks like Oprah and Dr Oz are finally suing all these sham companies pushing resveratrol and acai berry and [insert other magical wonder drug here] for using Oprah and Dr Oz’s personas without their consent. A majority have also been alleged to have used false endorsements from the aforementioned celebrities.
So the question here is, could the advertising outlets bear any liability for running advertisements for these companies? I mean, they made money off Dr Oz and Oprah’s images and “endorsements” too, could Dr Oz and Oprah elect to go after these companies and get them to disgorge profits as well?
Years ago a local TV station had to pay a $10,000 fine to the FTC for airing commercials that were proven to be “bait and switch.”
I asked how the TV station could be liable.
Here’s what I was told:
It seemed that while taping the commercial the client couldn’t come up with a sample of the low cost item being advertised (to show on camera). And he couldn’t come up with a date when they WOULD have the item in inventory so they could get a picture of it.
There apparantly was a lot more to it than that, but anyhoo the TV station was fined and they had to pay it.
Yeah, but then the advertiser is making money off someone else’s likeness and that seems to fly in the face of a public figure being allowed to control who makes money from their likeness (subject to exclusions like parody, comparison, etc). I don’t see how the person misusing the celebrity’s likeness is in a position to indemnify the media outlet since the rights to the persona was never theirs in the first place…?
I work in an industry where we routinely print the logo of our sponsors on our marketing materials. The logos are trademarked, and we have permission (in a contract) to use them.
There have been a couple of times when we’ve done multi-media materials that we have had to sign a contract with a manufacturer (for example a DVD duplication company) to warrant that we have permission to use any logos, music, and other copyrighted materials. So, for example, if we have a theme song at the start of our DVD, we solemnly swear in writing, that we have permission to use it. And if the DVD company gets sued for “making illegal copies of that song”, the action gets passed right along to us for being lying dirtbags.
So I would assume advertising contracts are similar. So if I use a copyrighted image in my advertisement, the magazine that prints my ad on their pages isn’t liable for my evil, because they made me sign that warranty taking all the blame for its contents.
In practice, I’m not sure how it actually works out (what with never having been sued and all).