Rights of Celebrity Under Intellectual Property Laws in India

Abstract

Intellectual property is a multidimensional property, which protects rights of celebrity to some extent; it is the important development in the field of intellectual property rights (IPR) law, especially trademark and copyright legislation deals with specified topic. The personality of celebrity is created after long time of struggle and investment of time, money, labour and intellectual mind. Celebrities are popular in the society and are able to lend their voice, face, name, photograph for commercial or non-commercial purposes, and to make reaches out of their identity. Generally, name or fame of celebrity is used for promoting trade and sale of product sometime which is against their image, identity, dignity or personality. If someone uses that fame or name for the purpose of promoting his/her goods or business, it would be termed as unfair trade practice, misappropriation of the intellectual property of the celebrity, an act of passing off, etc. To protect their identity, celebrity enjoys certain special rights like right to personality, right to privacy and right to publicity from unauthorised use by other person. But in the absence of special legislation to deal with this topic, rights of celebrity are abused many more time. Again, in the faster digital networking, it is not possible to prevent misuse of it. There are various international conventions and treaties which have recognised these rights directly or indirectly. Judiciary recognises rights of celebrity in limited scope in limited case laws. So, due to this reason, the researcher in this paper tried to focus a light on different rights of celebrity and their protection under the law of intellectual property.