14 August
2007

















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     publicity rights

Today's London Times reports on publicity rights litigation in the US, with a UK photographer suing a US film company over unauthorised use of a childhood photo on one of their adult content DVDs.

Lara Jade Coton has taken action against Texas-based TVX after it featured her self-portrait - made some 4 years ago - on the cover of Body Magic, an adult DVD.

Coton is reported as saying she was "absolutely horrified" to discover the unauthorised use of her snap, which she had published on the Deviantart online artists showcase. A request to TVX for removal of the DVD and compensation apparently elicited the response: "Nice try, toots".

The company appears to have been unfamiliar with concepts highlighted in Huw Beverley-Smith's The Commercial Appropriation of Personality (Oxford: Oxford Uni Press 2002), Privacy, Property & Personality: Civil Law Perspectives on Commercial Appropriation (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 2005) by Smith, Ansgar Ohly & Agnes Lucas-Schloetter and other works highlighted here.

TVX appears to have scraped her image from Deviantart ("That is the only place I put it, so they must have got it from there") and initially provided an abusive response, reportedly commenting "Actually, removing your image will help improve the sell [sic] of the DVD".

TVX acknowledged that it had used the image, dismissing Coton's rights as copyright owner (or as subject of the photo) and claiming that the photo was in the public domain.

The freelance guy who does the artwork for us, he says he found the picture on an adult porn site.... I think we have been the most responsible company. I have a granddaughter, so do I sympathise? Yes. I don't want her image used on a DVD cover.

The extent of sympathy is unclear: TVX is reported to have removed the photo from the DVD cover but not from the contents of that DVD and Coton's lawyer apparently claims to have obtained six copies of the disk despite assurances from TVX. Coton filed a suit in a US federal court in Florida, alleging copyright infringement, civil conspiracy, misappropriation of her image, invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

Her lawyer commented that TVX

had the audacity to blame Lara Jade for the disappointing sales of its porn movie. We're asking a jury to award damages, including punitive damages, for the outrageous conduct of Mr Burge and TVX. We're also asking the court to stop these pornographers from using the picture and to impound any copies of the movie or other materials on which Lara Jade’s picture appears.

If it's not a crime to put a 14-year-old child on the cover of a porn video, it sure ought to be.

With a nice grasp of current anxieties he continued that TVX's appropriation of the photo demonstrated the ease with which children can be victimised in "the age of social networking sites" such as Facebook.

This amazing technology allows us all to share our photos with friends and loved ones, but parents must real-ise that any picture a child puts on the internet is about three mouse clicks away from being stolen by anybody.

Never fear, a lawyer is near ... although TVX appears to be so small (which perhaps explains its apparent ineptitude in responding to Coton's complaint) that the photographer may not receive significant compensation.

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