Opinion ID: 1217420
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: pictorial representation

Text: Discussion of the tort often assumes that what the plaintiff objects to is the reporting of past or present facts or information by traditional forms of written publication. The classic illustration is Sidis v. F-R Pub. Corporation, 113 F.2d 806 (2nd Cir.), cert. den. 311 U.S. 711, 61 S.Ct. 393, 85 L.Ed. 462 (1940), in which the New Yorker magazine was absolved from tort liability for publishing the story of a one-time child prodigy who had long lived a life of somewhat eccentric obscurity. Arguably, the widespread dissemination of a person's picture, which television has made the essence of much otherwise unremarkable as well as of traditional news, sacrifices the pictured person's privacy in a sense distinct from disclosure of factual information. Claims to a right to prevent unconsented use of one's likeness in fact long antedate the advent of television. The first decisions respectively rejecting and accepting a privacy basis for such claims, Roberson v. Rochester Folding Box Co., 171 N.Y. 538, 64 N.E. 442 (1902), and Pavesich v. New England Life Ins. Co., 122 Ga. 190, 50 S.E. 68 (1905), involved commercial use of plaintiffs' pictures. [11] Sensitivity about reproduction of one's likeness is not a 19th century refinement of western civilization, as is sometimes supposed; many cultures have feared the magical power conferred by possession of a person's image. The settlers who brought the common law to the Oregon Territory could find that this sensitivity preceded their arrival. Northwest native people such as the Chinook, according to Herbert Spencer, if photographed, `fancied that their spirit thus passed into the keeping of others, who could torment it at pleasure,' an apprehension that plaintiff, at least, would not consider unrealistic today. [12] Civil law systems derive limits on the unconsented publication of photographs by subsuming a right to one's own likeness under a right of personality. [13] Doubtless in many instances a picture not only is worth a thousand words to a publisher but words would be worth nothing at all. The respective editors would not likely have thought it worthwhile to publish a written report that Mrs. Graham had her dress blown by air jets at an amusement park, see Daily Times Democrat v. Graham, 276 Ala. 380, 162 So.2d 474 (1964), or that Mr. and Mrs. Gill showed affection characteristic of love at first sight, see Gill v. Curtis Pub. Co., 38 Cal.2d 273, 239 P.2d 630 (1952). Some filmed or broadcast scenes compare to verbal reports in dramatic impact about as hearing music compares to reading a score, and the emotional reaction of the person who is depicted rather than described may likewise be greater. In Commonwealth v. Wiseman, 356 Mass. 251, 249 N.E.2d 610, cert. den. 398 U.S. 960, 90 S.Ct. 2165, 26 L.Ed.2d 546 (1969), Massachusetts courts restricted the showing of a film of the conditions and treatment of mental patients in a state institution, a subject whose obvious public importance would have prevented censorship of written documentation. [14] Nonetheless, the difference between undesired publicity by word or by picture seems to concern only the degree of the subject's psychic discomfort rather than the nature of the interest claimed to be invaded. Perhaps the present plaintiff would not have felt offended if KATU-TV had verbally described his bloodied and disheveled condition rather than showing it. But neither the courts nor the commentators have made a distinction in principle between one woman's objections to a book based on her experiences, Cason v. Baskin, 155 Fla. 198, 20 So.2d 243 (1944), and another's to a motion picture, Melvin v. Reid, 112 Cal. App. 285, 297 P. 91 (1931), and we perceive none. A distinction has been perceived, however, between publicizing a person's name, image, or other identifying facts for some intrinsic interest or for purposes of advertising someone's products or services. As already noted, the early decisions for and against claims based on privacy, Pavesich v. New England Life Ins. Co., supra , and Roberson v. Rochester Folding Box Co., supra , involved commercial use of plaintiffs' pictures to advertise, respectively, life insurance and a brand of flour. When the New York Court of Appeals declined to hold that defendants' unconsented use of a young woman's picture to advertise flour was an invasion of a right to privacy under existing law, the New York legislature by statute provided for damages as well as injunctive relief against using the name, portrait or picture of any person for advertising purposes, or for the purposes of trade without the written consent first obtained. [15] Many of the reported privacy cases are interpretations of this and similar statutes, which necessarily require courts to decide what is an advertising purpose or a purpose of trade. Some courts have reached comparable decisions without statutes. [16] Plaintiff in the present case concedes that KATU-TV would not be liable to him if it had included his picture in the ordinary news coverage of a traffic accident. He contends that the broadcaster became liable because instead it used the footage to draw audience attention to a later broadcast concerning emergency medical services, in which plaintiff's picture was not included. Does the distinction between commercial and noncommercial use of a person's name, likeness, or life history rest on a difference in the interest invaded by the publication or in the character of the publisher's motives and purposes? The reason should bear on the remedy. When actors, athletes or other performers object, not to a loss of anonymity, but to unauthorized exploitation of their valuable public identities, the remedy should reflect the wrongful appropriation of a right to publicity that has economic value to the plaintiff as well as to the defendant, rather than damages for psychic distress at a loss of privacy. See, e.g., Grant v. Esquire, Inc., 367 F. Supp. 876, 879-81 (S.D.N.Y. 1973) (actor's face superimposed on figure wearing coat featured in fashion story); Haelen Laboratories v. Topps Chewing Gum, 202 F.2d 866 (2d Cir.), cert. den. 346 U.S. 816, 74 S.Ct. 26, 98 L.Ed. 343 (1953); Ellis, supra, 64 Iowa L.Rev. at 1128, 1131-33. [17] When a person who neither has nor wants a marketable public identity demands damages for unauthorized publicity, such a person may claim injury to a noneconomic rather than an economic interest in his or her privacy; but it is not always obvious, as it is not in this case, why the loss of privacy is different when it occurs in a commercial rather than a noncommercial form of publication. If the plaintiff can show no psychic injury at all, for instance an infant whose picture has been used in an advertisement for baby food rather than in a magazine or television report on child care, the answer must be that the advertiser, but not the reporter, has unjustly enriched himself by appropriating something for which he is expected to pay, an answer that begs the question. [18] Our system relies for freedom of information, ideas, and entertainment, high or low, primarily on privately owned media of communication, operating at private cost and seeking private profit. Books, newspapers, films, and broadcasts are produced and distributed at private cost and for private profit, that is to say, commercially, and the use of materials from the lives of living persons in such publications can enrich authors, photographers, and publishers just as their use in advertisements, for instance the writers and publishers of the New Yorker magazine in Sidis v. F-R Pub. Corporation, supra . This predictably causes problems in applying a test such as New York's advertising or purposes of trade, when the reproduction of names and photographs properly published for news or public interest purposes has also served to sell and advertise the medium in which they were contained, as Justice Breitel noted in Booth v. Curtis Publishing Company, 15 A.D.2d 343, 223 N.Y.S.2d 737, 739 (Sup.Ct.), aff'd 11 N.Y.2d 907, 228 N.Y.S.2d 468, 182 N.E.2d 812 (1962). Compare, e.g., Stephano v. News Group Publications, Inc., 64 N.Y.2d 174, 485 N.Y.S.2d 220, 474 N.E.2d 580 (1984) (use of model's picture in magazine report on fashions not for purposes of trade even if published to increase circulation), with Thompson v. Close-Up, Inc., 277 A.D. 848, 98 N.Y.S.2d 300 (1950) (where picture is unrelated to article, use of picture to increase magazine's circulation may be for purposes of trade); see also Griffin v. Medical Soc. of New York, 7 Misc.2d 549, 11 N.Y.S.2d 109 (1939) (article by physicians in a medical journal might be found to be written to advertise their professional accomplishments). Publication of an accident victim's photograph is not appropriation for commercial use simply because the medium itself is operated for profit. Leverton v. Curtis Publishing Co., 192 F.2d 974 (3rd Cir.1951) (applying Pennsylvania law). There is another reason why an unauthorized use of a person's name or image to sell goods or services can be a tortious appropriation when the same use in the content of material published to be sold is not. The use may make it appear that the person has consented to endorse the advertised product, with or without being paid to do so. When that impression is in fact false, the appropriation of the person's identity places the person in a false light much as the unauthorized use of Mr. Hinish's name in the political telegram did in Hinish v. Meier & Frank Co., supra . Such an inference is most likely to be drawn about professional performers, who are widely known to be paid for endorsing products in print and television advertisements and even for using their sponsors' sports clothes and equipment in their work. They have been allowed to prevent the exploitation of their public identities even to promote the publication in which they are depicted. See Cher v. Forum International, Ltd., 692 F.2d 634 (9th Cir.1982), cert. den. 462 U.S. 1120, 103 S.Ct. 3089, 77 L.Ed.2d 1350 (1983) (applying California law). The right is not limited to professionals; in an early New Jersey case, the inventor Thomas Edison won an injunction against the use of his image and a fictitious endorsement on medicine labels. Edison v. Edison Polyform & Mfg. Co., 73 N.J. Eq. 136, 67 A. 392 (1907). [19] This theory is not available, however, to a person whose image, with no established public familiarity, appears in a commercial context only incidentally, perhaps as one of several persons in a public scene, or otherwise under circumstances that plainly are not presented so as to convey any endorsement by that person. The New York statute has been held not to cover the use of a photograph of family members of a public figure whose magazine article was advertised on television, Friedan v. Friedan, 414 F. Supp. 77 (S.D.N.Y. 1976), or the use on a book cover of a photograph showing plaintiff in conversation with a clergyman who was the subject of the book, Dallesandro v. Henry Holt and Company, 4 A.D.2d 470, 166 N.Y.S.2d 805 (1957). [20] In the present case, plaintiff does not claim that KATU-TV's promotional spots portrayed him as an accident victim in a manner implying that he endorsed its forthcoming program about emergency medical services, and the record on summary judgment suggests no such inference. His claim is not for the economic value of such an endorsement, nor for any gain unjustly realized by the broadcaster from appropriating a photograph belonging to plaintiff. The videotape was made at the accident scene by defendant's cameraman, and the identity of the accident victim was immaterial. Rather, plaintiff claims damages for mental distress from its publication. Without a showing that plaintiff's picture was either obtained or broadcast in a manner or for a purpose wrongful beyond the unconsented publication itself, that claim fails.