The protection of privacy and personality is one of the most fascinating issues confronting any legal system. It has attracted the attention of a number of distinguished academics, practitioners and judges in the major legal systems and there is an increasingly rich comparative jurisprudence. The relationship between privacy and commercial exploitation of an individual's attributes in advertising and merchandising is long-standing and provided the background for the developing law of privacy in several jurisdictions. Nevertheless, it has received relatively limited attention when compared to other aspects of privacy and is often regarded as being the more proper concern of intellectual property law. This book provides a detailed analysis of the different ways in which the major common law and civil law jurisdictions have responded to demands for protection of attributes of an individual's personality and the difficulties in reconciling privacy, personality and intellectual property.

Inevitably a balance has to be struck between breadth and depth of coverage and we do not attempt to give a full account of all European legal systems. Rather, we have chosen four jurisdictions, England and Wales, the United States, Germany and France, which represent the most important approaches to the problem of commercial exploitation. Some jurisdictions, most notably England and Wales, are only beginning to address the issue of protecting attributes of personality from unauthorised commercial exploitation.