6 - Conclusions

Summary

Introduction

Commercial appropriation of personality has generally been approached from two basic perspectives in the major common law and civil law jurisdictions analysed in the preceding chapters: (i) the unfair competition or intellectual property perspective aligning the problem most closely with the common forms of intellectual property rights such as patents, copyright and trade marks and (ii) the privacy and personality perspective, focusing on the damage to human dignity. The differences in substantive legal protection examined in the preceding chapters remain quite significant and a number of legal concepts have been employed to address the same basic problem. Despite these differences, a surprising number of common trends may be identified from the discussions of the individual systems. This chapter draws together some of the common features and patterns of development that emerge from the individual systems. While the developments have at times been systematic, they have more often been rather more haphazard, although they may be distilled into three basic models. These basic models inevitably attempt to reconcile the economic and non-economic aspects of personality, which often conflict in the development of intellectual property rights in aspects of personality. This is a problem that pervades the analysis in the preceding chapters and is summarised in a subsequent section. Finally, we examine the effects of European human rights law both in raising the threshold of protection for privacy interests and in marking the boundaries, which are often difficult to identify, between privacy and freedom of expression.