Importance Of A Celebrity

What is A Celebrity? Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, Oprah Winfrey, Siti Nurhaliza, and P. Ramlee are amongst the names well known by you and me. These famous people are called “celebrities”. A celebrity is a famous person or an individual with a state of being well known . He or she holds a personality that is celebrated by the society by what he or she does. The prominence in his or her doing has made them famous and renowned in the public’s eye. A celebrity could be a singer, an actor, a film-maker, an athlete, a socialite and even a politician. Brad Pitt, who starred in many popular movies viewed by people around the world, is a celebrity. Lee Chong Wei, a Malaysian sportsman who plays badminton professionally and competes in international …show more content…
Status quo, protection rights that are normally deliberated and statistically ascending, is the image rights. Image, in this context, means the aspects that include their name, photograph, signature, nickname, mannerisms or any other distinctive characteristic that may identify them and can be exploited for financial gain. With the emergence and availability of this protection, celebrities will exhaust all legal tools at their disposal to prevent the dilution of their bankability that will arise with any unauthorised use of their image. Image protection may amount to fortifying both from the damage of negative publicity and also from those who seek to profit from it without permission. Celebrity image rights’ violation is now a trending …show more content…
All of them had been involved in court cases in the UK, Holland, Spain, Germany, and at the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) relating to image rights . The United Kingdom still refuses to acknowledge the concept of image rights in English law, although the courts have encountered a number of high profile cases over many years. Recently, in the case of Rihanna v Topshop , the judge denies that it had anything to do with “image rights”, no matter what may be its position, elsewhere in the world. He further states that, “there is no such thing as a free standing general right by a famous person (or anyone else) to control the reproduction of their image.” In this case, Rihanna became aware that retailer Topshop was selling t-shirts with her photograph on them without her consent, so she launched a passing-off case against them. The judge accepted the arguments laid down by Rihanna’s legal team and found that they inevitably meant that she had suffered loss as a result of the passing off; in terms of sales lost to her merchandising business and also loss of control over her reputation in fashion