Under the common law jurisprudence a personality right is the right of an individual to control
the commercial use of his or her name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal aspects of one's
identity. This right to personality is classified into two categories;
a. The right of publicity or to keep one's image and likeness from being commercially
exploited without permission or contractual compensation and the right to privacy, and;
b. The right to be left alone and not have one's personality represented publicly without
permission.
Basically under common law jurisprudence publicity rights fall in the realm of the tort of
“passing off” which idea was developed on the notion of natural rights that every individual
should have a right to control how, if at all, his or her "persona" is commercialised by third
parties who intend to help propel their sales or visibility of own product or service.
This means that where there is a publicity rights contention then the issue for the court to deal
with and decide upon is whether a significant section of the public would be misled into
believing (correctly or incorrectly) that a commercial arrangement had been concluded
between a plaintiff and a defendant under which a plaintiff agreed to an advert involving the
image or reputation of a famous person. The actionable cause, therefore, under misrepresentation
would then bring the suggestion that a plaintiff did in fact endorse or license a defendant's
product or somehow has control over those products. Arising from this seemingly clear common
law jurisprudence, it is my humble view that for one to succeed in an action for infringement of
image rights such a person has to prove the following basic elements:
-The plaintiff must be identifiable.