There’s a campaign on right now in Australia for ING Direct banking which uses an image of Queen Elizabeth off an Australian banknote, where she has been altered to wear hair rollers with the tagline “Make over your money…”
Cute, but surely they don’t have HRH’s permission to use her image in this way? Does the fact its an image from our banknotes mean they don’t need her permission?
They couldn’t do this with another famous persons image without permission and paying them I assume?
As far as I understand, nobody owns a copyright or trademark on their own face. It is possible to use someone’s image without permission, and get away with it. However, some people that try it get successfully sued for libel. This is a sort of backdoor, and there is no general tort against it. Legal precedent in UK law Tolley Vs Fry
Hitler did. German law gave him a trademark on his image. So all of the coins and stamps and posters and whatever else had his face on it had to pay him a royalty. It was one of his primary sources of personal income.
This is not a copyright or trademark issue, nor is it libel/defamation. Under the common law, it’s a privacy tort. You have a cause of action for commercial misappropriation of your name, image, or identity. This common law right has been codified in statute in many states.
The traditional causes of action in privacy are:
IIRC, at least in the US, the person may have to fork over some cash to the public servant. At least in the case of VPUSA, Spiro Agnew, when they made the SA watches with his likeness on it, IIRC, the judge/jury made the watchmaker hand over a split of the proceeds. I don’t know if Agnew kept it, or gave some to charity.
That’s all I got.
Best wishes,
hh
HRH QE2 backs Insurance Regulation! It has a…ring to it, doesn’t it?
In the US, you need to get permission to use a living person’s image in advertising.
Woody Allen, for instance, won a $5 million judgment from American Apparel last year when they used his name in an ad campaign without permission.
I don’t see how this wouldn’t apply to politicians (not counting election ads). The image on an ad implies an endorsement, and you can’t do that without permission.
I thought image rights were covered by state law not federal.
Yes it’s state law. But , as I said, it’s a common law privacy tort, so the right will exist in some form even if it hasn’t been codified in statute.
Some states grant even stronger rights under their “right of publicity” statutes.
Well if they addressed HM as an HRH, I’ll bet HM was not amused and told them to bugger off.
The Lord Chamberlain’s Office has guidelines on the rules that apply within the UK (pdf). As those point out, the Advertising Standards Authority has rules specifically on this issue.
However, what they don’t say is that the ASA code is purely voluntary. But the ASA does have considerable informal clout, so most advertisers would doubtless consider that ignoring it would be more trouble than it was worth. Unless, of course, it was the publicity provided by a censure from the ASA that they they wanted in the first place. Nike recently edited one of their TV adverts to avoid the problem.
Banknotes have the further complication that the Bank of England holds the copyrights to their designs.