Mullins, M. (2012). New Fame in a New Ballgame: Right of Publicity in the Era of Instant Celebrity

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Article Review:

Mullins, M. (2012). New Fame in a New Ballgame: Right of Publicity in the Era of Instant Celebrity. Indiana Law Review, 45(3), 869-895. Retrieved from: [1]

By: Natalie Treude

When one thinks of celebrities we imagine they have no privacy and their publicity is to whoever can expose them, but there are rights for this and they legally can control what the public sees. It was not always like this and the right of publicity become a named doctrine only as recently as 1953. The right of publicity is closely related to the right to privacy, the right of publicity doctrine asserts that “An individual whose likeness has commercial value should have the exclusive, but assignable, right to control the commercial use of his likeness and reap the profits from its use” (Mullins, 2012, 869). This was easily controlled until the Internet came along. Due to the new definition of what a celebrity can be because of the internet and this new breed of “instant” celebrity, the debate over the right of publicity is now reshaped, bringing it right back to where it started in 1953.

In Mullins article, “New Fame in a New Ballgame: Right of Publicity in the Era of Instant Celebrity” this new publicity right in the digital age is explored and examined in a way that can aid in the process of getting the rights to protect online celebrities and their publicity and piracy. Mullins uses Tragedy of Speech Theory which is used to describe a situation in a shared-resource system (such as the Internet) where individual users behave in their own self-interest when they know it goes against the common good of all users by devaluing or ruining the resource through their selfish actions. He uses it in order to discuss the exhaustibility of a resource (the Internet), but also the exhaustibility of a famous individual’s marketability which was extremely interesting as Mullins feeds off of the statement, “all publicity is good publicity” when it comes to the exposure of celebrities on the Internet.

This article discusses how the development of the Internet has changed the game for privacy and publicity rights. Nowadays, anything can become popular and famous within hours and we need to control what can and cannot be published and seen before it becomes too famous or goes viral. The biggest indication of the new, Internet-driven media age is accessibility. No longer is wide-spread commercial distribution controlled by corporate gatekeepers, but it is controlled by the public and that is where the danger lies. Another danger this article points out is that the barriers to fame have fallen and anything can be made public instantly, giving no time to have content go unseen. Mullins points out that the most important aspect of his article is the “underlying concern with protecting personal autonomy and the sanctity of the self” (895). It was important for Mullins to include and discuss the Internet, but he also mentions regular celebrity rights as a way of comparison, allowing the whole article to have a strong argument, but the main focus was the online celebrity and their rights with the development of the Internet.

What I found was the biggest strength of Mullins article was that he attempts to solve the issue of what content can and should be seen in a digital world that has no barriers to the content that is released an exposed. Unfortunately, the development of the Internet has caused this publicity right to go right back to where it started, therefore, pushing society back in a way, but Mullins is the trying to make a change and can be the start of something impactful that can come along in the future. These rights need to be implemented for the Internet in order to secure the public figures that we look up to online. With this being said, I found that Mullins used the Tragedy of Speech Theory in a way that did not aid his argument. It became confusing when he did not relate it to the Internet/resource (the way it is supposed to be used) but related it to a public figure’s marketability. It was a statement that was rather short and then contradicted in the next paragraph. It almost seemed as though he just threw it in so he could incorporate a theory into his work because it was not explained in depth and was so brief it almost seemed irrelevant. I would have suggested going more in-depth in that section as it is an interesting theory and concept that could have strengthened his argument entirely.

Mullins' article was extremely important in this day and age as we need to start thinking about publicity and privacy rights online. Public and private rights will become a vital legal protection for an increasingly broad and diverse platform such as the Internet and Mullins argues this clearly in his article. It was extremely informative and useful for rights to be put in place and hopefully, from this article, we can see this change in the next couple of years.

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