The infringment of personality rights
By; Znar, Katja, Aziz
What are personality rights?
Personality rights
- Right of a person to protect his/her personality under the right to privacy or property
- Consist of two types of rights :
1. the right of publicity
2. the right to privacy
- You have the right to control the commercial use of your name, likeness, image, voice and other aspects of your identity
- personality rights are designed to protect the individual's reputation, privacy, and identity
What is infringement of personality rights?
Infringement
- Infringements against personality rights can be classified as the unauthorized use of the name or likeness of a person in order to sell one's goods or services or just benefitting from someone
- Commonly done to public figures or celebrities as a form of appropriation of one's personality, but it can be done to anyone regardless of their social status
Infringements can include ;
1. Defamation: libel and slander
2. Defamatory media reports and defamatory press reports
3. Violations of the right to their own image - deep fakes
4. Unauthorized commercial exploitations of the general personality right and the right to their ---own image
5. Protection of the post-mortem right of personality of the deceased’s relative
- Infringements against personality rights are not limited to a specific group, it can be done by anyone
- We can see the infringement of personality rights being broken by the media or press; due to digitalization this problem has skyrocketed
Princess Caroline of Monaco
Von Hannover v. Germany (freedom of press v. right to private life)
Case law
example 1
- Since 90’s, the applicant tried through courts to prevent the publication of photos about her private life in the tabloid press
- The photos that were subjects of this exact proceeding were published in different German presses
- The photos expressed mostly Caroline with her family or friends
- German courts ruled i.e. that Caroline represented “par excellence” (in English “above all”) and her right to protection of private life stopped at her front door
- Caroline appealed to ECHR, claiming that the German court decisions had infringed her right to respect for her private and family life, guaranteed by Article 8 of the Convention
- The Government of Germany stated that the public had a legitimate interest in knowing how the person behaved generally in public
European Convention on Human Rights
- The Court stated that it considers the deciding factor in balancing the protection of private life against freedom of expression should lie in the contribution that the published photos and articles make to a debate of general interest
- In the case they made no such contribution, since the applicant exercises no official function and the photos and articles related exclusively to details of her private life
Finnish Case
KKO:2018:51 (freedom of speech v. right to private life)
example 2
- Person “B” was sentenced in prison for the sexual abuse of a child
- Online media (MTV) wrote about the sentence: age and name of doomed and also information about the victim was published
- Person “A” was an administrator of a group in Facebook, which was created in order to discuss similar sentences and the persons who were behind of similar crimes
- “A” shared in a group a post which contained a link of the online article news and a link of a photo of B, which was openly available on Facebook page of doomed
- The Supreme Court stated, that A should have understood that B will be scorn after such a post (due to nature of the crime)
- “A” was stated as guilty of dissemination of information violating personal privacy