Brief note on coverage of Massachusetts Senate’s passage of Right of Publicity bill

The Massachusetts Senate has passed a bill urged by Bill Cosby to statutorily recognize a post-mortem Right of Publicity in Massachusetts.  The bill heads next to the Massachusetts House of Representatives.  I’m including a link (below) to NPR’s coverage of this very positive legislative development.

As is often the case when the media covers the Right of Publicity, the coverage does not give the most balanced picture of the functioning of these rights and the policy purposes behind them.  That’s probably the fault of no one or nothing other than time limitations and the need to get in and out of a complex topic in short segments. But, for example, it’s really not that difficult to determine who owns the Right of Publicity of a personality after a person dies, as the host declares.  The coverage also does not point out all the limitations and allowances for First Amendment purposes that accompany most Right of Publicity statutes.  And lastly, I strongly caution against acting on host Anthony Brooks’ conclusion that “if a business wants to trade on the image of Marilyn Monroe, they can.”  (Just after the 2:00 mark in the NRP clip.)

Professor Ray Madoff of Boston College Law School does a good job discussing some of the high points of the Right of Publicity.  To the credit of the producer of this segment on NPR/Radio Boston, I (the administrator of http://www.RightofPublicity.com) was consulted to verify certain information about Right of Publicity statutes throughout the country (the part in the interview when the host Sacha Pfeiffer says “we looked this up”).

Here’s a link to the radio segment: http://radioboston.wbur.org/2014/06/13/dead-right-publicity