A Right of Personality for the UK: A comprehensive study of its significance, rationality, and its impacts on UK celebrities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The English legal system currently does not recognise a right of personality, nor does it confer any exclusive rights in a celebrity’s name, image, likeness or identity. Absent such rights, protection against unauthorised exploitations of celebrity personality is only piecemeal, in that, the English courts ‘stretch’ the existing legal doctrines to remedy such misuses. The tort of passing off has been stretched the most in this regard, but owing to its requirement of misrepresentation, even the obvious cases of persona misappropriation could not be accommodated. Even privacy-based tort of breach of confidence was invoked, but privacy could not form the basis of protection as the object of protection under privacy is fundamentally different from that of under personality. The established IP rights, like trademarks and copyrights, were also applied, but it failed to deliver, since none of these principles were originally designed to accommodate personality claims. Such inadequacy and ineffectiveness of the available legal remedies have created a ‘lacunae’ in the English law, as the system is failing to provide the celebrities their desired levels of protection or any at all. The thesis addresses this lacunae in law and advocates that the only solution lies in adopting a distinct right of personality in the system. Proposing so is both pragmatic and practicable since such rights can only remedy personality misappropriation, and most importantly, adoption of such rights have provided the necessary solution in many other legal systems around the world. This thesis conducts a thorough analysis of the rationales that commonly underlies such personality rights and by evaluating the views of both proponents and opponents, constructs the legal foundation/basis of the right. A comparative study of ten (10) jurisdictions, combining both common-law states (like USA, Canada, etc.) and civil law states (like Germany, France, Italy, etc) is also conducted and based on the experience and practice of such compared states, potential models for a right of personality have been recommended in this thesis as the solution. The models recommended are designed to meet the modern realities of persona exploitation and is influenced by the current English IP regimes and the international jurisprudence available on personality rights. The proposed models are also designed with an in-built check and balance mechanism so that any monopolistic application of the right can be minimised and competing rights of free speech and/or public interest, if any, in the impugned exploitation are not undermined.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".