Introduction

A film director tries to prevent a major international media conglomerate from rebranding a cable television station using his adopted name. A pop star prepares to do battle with a football club over the ownership of a nickname that its fans have been using for more than seventy years. A long-retired athlete makes a complaint to Ofcom and then threatens to sue a telecoms company for parodying his likeness from the 1970s in a highly successful advertising campaign. An ageing rock star threatens to take out an injunction to prevent a music journalist with the same name from writing a column in an American journal. Welcome to the crazy world of ‘image rights’ and a power struggle waged by celebrities to control all forms of publicity associated with their name and likeness.

In this chapter, we shall discover the inroads into media rights that have been made by, or on behalf of, leading entertainers and sports stars. As we have seen in other areas of media activity, the concept of image rights opens up wider philosophical questions around intellectual property that have a direct impact on the political economy of the media.

The cult of celebrity takes up increasing amounts of media output, and it is not difficult to see why stars and their agents seek to control this particular aspect of their ‘brand’ value. As Lane (1999: 48) notes, ‘celebrity seems to exert a disproportionate influence on the Zeitgeist’, and in ‘this merchandising melee, traders and celebrity are left squabbling over entitlement to the financial spoils’ (Lane, 1999: 49).