Image Rights and Personality Rights: Why Protecting a Celebrity's Likeness Works Differently by Country
An explainer on how the US right of publicity, UK personality rights and other legal systems differ in protecting a public figure's name, image and likeness.
Photo: Txllxt TxllxT · CC BY-SA 4.0 · source
When a company uses a celebrity’s face on a product without permission, or an AI tool generates a synthetic version of a well-known voice, the legal remedy available depends heavily on which country’s courts get involved. There is no single global “image rights” law. Instead, different legal systems have built very different tools — some statutory, some improvised from older doctrines — to let a person control commercial use of their own name, face and voice.
The US model: a patchwork of state laws
In the United States, control over one’s likeness is generally called the “right of publicity,” and it is not a federal right at all. It exists as a “patchwork of state laws,” with each state deciding independently whether to recognize the right, how long it lasts, and whether it survives the person’s death, according to a comparative legal analysis by law firm Troutman Pepper Locke. Some states have gone further recently, enacting specific “digital replica” statutes aimed at unauthorized AI-generated likenesses and deepfakes — a response to synthetic media that older publicity statutes never anticipated. The result is that the same use of a celebrity’s image can be lawful in one state and actionable in another, which is why entertainment contracts involving U.S. talent are often written to specify which state’s law governs a dispute.
The UK model: rights borrowed from other doctrines
The United Kingdom takes a markedly different approach: it has no standalone statutory right of personality at all. Instead, individuals rely on a combination of existing legal tools — trademark law, the tort of “passing off” (which prevents one party from misrepresenting a connection with another), and advertising self-regulation — to stop unauthorized commercial use of their image, per the same Troutman Pepper Locke analysis. Because none of these doctrines was designed specifically for image protection, each covers only part of the problem, leaving gaps that the article notes are becoming more visible as synthetic media technology advances. That mismatch is fueling calls, described as strongest in the UK, for a clearer, dedicated statutory right.
Why the difference matters practically
This legal split has real consequences for how deals get papered and where disputes get filed. A U.S. celebrity licensing their image for a global campaign typically needs contract language addressing the specific state law that will apply, plus separate consideration of how European or other jurisdictions would treat the same use. Academic comparisons of the U.S. right of publicity against European frameworks note that European systems more often root image protection in broader personal rights or privacy law rather than in a distinct commercial “publicity” concept, reflecting different underlying philosophies about whether the interest being protected is fundamentally economic (a form of property) or personal (a form of privacy or dignity), a distinction discussed in a comparative legal study published via ScienceDirect.
Not just about advertising
These rights extend well beyond formal ad campaigns. They’re the legal basis for objections to merchandise using a celebrity’s face without a license, for disputes over AI-generated content that mimics a real person’s voice or appearance, and — in jurisdictions where the right survives death — for estates continuing to control a deceased performer’s image commercially. A research guide from the University of Illinois College of Law notes that publicity rights sit at the intersection of intellectual property, privacy and unfair competition law, which is part of why the same fact pattern can be analyzed under several different legal theories depending on the jurisdiction, as outlined in the library’s international IP guide.
The takeaway
There is no universal “image rights” statute a celebrity can simply invoke worldwide. In the U.S., protection depends on which state’s publicity law applies; in the UK, it depends on cobbling together trademark, passing-off and advertising rules that were never built for the purpose; and elsewhere, the underlying legal theory may be privacy rather than property. Anyone licensing, or disputing use of, a public figure’s likeness needs to know which of these frameworks actually governs the case at hand — because the answer to “is this legal?” genuinely changes depending on where you ask.
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