| Portrait interest and other interests concerning personality identification that are worth protecting are major issues in civil law. Civil law deals with people, revealing the care and respect to human dignity. Montesquieu once said: “In the motherly eyes of civil law, each person weighs more than the entire nation.”For the past decades, portrait right and other personality rights become fortune-related or transferable due to the rapid growth of free-market economy, mass media and commercial advertising, which makes it quite common to utilize portrait economically. For example, merchants pay movie or sports stars for promoting their products with portrait identifications. It remains unquestionable that mass value of fortune exists in some portraits.Nevertheless, the development of economy has outrun academic theory and starts to affect our daily life. Traditional civil law theory holds that as a personality right, portrait right is entitled to those features: 1.monopolized to the natural person, can’t be separated and non-transferable; 2.unrelated to fortune, can’t be evaluated economically or inherited and only exists conceptually. Apparently such theory can’t explain the economic use of portraits. This thesis aims to deal with legal issues in the scope of the unorthodox phenomenon.Besides the general introduction and conclusion, this article is divided into 4 parts. The basic analysis route is: 1.Define economic use of portrait and summarize current limitation and protecting measures of the law. Several judgments are included to study the current practice of the courts.2.Introduce the American and German Law on economic utilization of portrait to set a possible example for us. In America, right of publicity originates from privacy and differs from it. In German, economic use of portrait relies on the general personality right. 3. Analyze possible interest conflicts in the use of portraiture and find a solution.4. Make some proposals to ameliorate current legal system based on analysis above: acknowledge, protect and reasonably restrain fortune interests in portrait under the possible dome of portrait right. |
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