The Six Million Dollar Tweet

tweet is limited to 140 characters, but a picture might be worth six million dollars. Actress Katherine Heigl, who rose to Hollywood stardom on the medical drama television series Grey’s Anatomy, is suing the Duane Reade pharmacy chain for tweeting her image.

At some point a paparazzo took a picture of Heigl carrying Duane Reade shopping bags on her way out of the pharmacy. Duane Reade found it on a celebrity gossip website. On March 18, 2014, Duane Reade included the image in a tweet that read, “Love a quick #DuaneReade run? Even @KatieHeigl can’t resist shopping #NYC’s favorite drugstore.

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The T- Shirt Found No Love – Rihanna Wins in Court

International singing star Rihanna (Robyn Rihanna Fenty to the court) won a lawsuit in July in England against the Top Shop stores over the manufacture and sale of an unauthorized T-Shirt bearing her image. Merchandise (such as T-shirts, jackets, buttons) is a very big business; so the respective rights of celebrities and merchants are important. I frequently work on licenses and litigation in this area and know firsthand how valuable these rights are – and how seriously infringements are taken.

In the United States, celebrities routinely win such cases because the US recognizes a celebrity’s “right of publicity” — that’s the right to control most commercial exploitations of a celebrity’s name, likeness, and biographical details.

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Facelifts, Celebrities, and Copyrights

Celebrity-focused websites are wildly popular. Websites are incredible vacuum cleaners of content. Photographs are easy to copy and publish without authorization. You get the picture: photographs are easy to steal. Photographers are truly challenged in making money from the licensing of their images because of this combination of forces.

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Olympians Strike Back: What’s News — and What’s Advertising — in the Age of Infotainment and Celebrity?

Celebrity is a currency of great value. TMZ, Entertainment Weekly, E!, and innumerable gossip websites and publications prove the point beyond dispute. A group of Olympians including Mark Spitz, Greg Louganis, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Amanda Beard have sued Samsung Corporation for using their image to endorse the company without their consent. So, it’s not uncommon that commercial advertisers want to push the edge of the envelope and find ways of using the names, likenesses, and other indicia of celebrities (without obtaining their permission and without paying them) in order to get the attention of us, the consumers.

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The opinions expressed on this blog are those of the author and are not to be construed as legal advice.

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