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Full-Text Articles in Law

The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman Nov 2012

The Inalienable Right Of Publicity, Jennifer E. Rothman

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This article challenges the conventional wisdom that the right of publicity is universally and uncontroversially alienable. Courts and scholars have routinely described the right as a freely transferable property right, akin to patents or copyrights. Despite such broad claims of unfettered alienability, courts have limited the transferability of publicity rights in a variety of instances. No one has developed a robust account of why such limits should exist or what their contours should be. This article remedies this omission and concludes that the right of publicity must have significantly limited alienability to protect the rights of individuals to control the …


When Antitrust Met Facebook, Christopher S. Yoo Jul 2012

When Antitrust Met Facebook, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

Social networks are among the hottest phenomena on the Internet. Facebook eclipsed Google as the most visited website in both 2010 and 2011. Moreover, according to Nielsen estimates, as of the end of 2011 the average American spent nearly seven hours per month on Facebook, which is more time than they spent on Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Microsoft, and Wikipedia combined. LinkedIn’s May 19, 2011 initial public offering (“IPO”) surpassed expectations, placing the value of the company at nearly $9 billion, and approximately a year later, its stock price had risen another 20 percent. Facebook followed suit a year later with …