Research On The Protection And Restriction Of Public Figure’s Right To Privacy

With the strengthening of consciousness of right in modern society, as one of the personality right, the right to privacy is showing an obvious trend of expansion. At the same time, the new technologies in network and media sectors are compressing people’s privacy and challenging the legal protection of the right to privacy. It makes the right to privacy of public figure get into a contradictory and precarious situation. The legal protection of the right to privacy is lagging in China and there’s still no article about the right to privacy of public figure in law. The lack of legislation results in the mess that the judicial adjudications of infringement cases have no direct basis in law, while the invasion of privacy is more and more frequent nowadays. Researching on the right to privacy of public figure, aiming at providing some reference opinions and theoretical basis for the perfection of our legal protection and restriction of the public figure’s right to privacy, by the method of theoretical analysis and comparative study, this paper discusses on the principles and scope of the protection and restriction on the public figure’s right to privacy from typed angle. Except the introduction and conclusion, this paper has four parts:The second chapter is about the definition of the public figure’s right to privacy. The definition of the right to privacy of public figure is based on the definitions of the right to privacy and the public figure, and the public figures are divided into different types in this part, after analyzing the differences between the public figure’s right to privacy and the generals, this part puts forward three value basis of the protection of the public figure’s right to privacy:personality freedom and personality dignity, the principle of "no abuse of right", the need of order.The third chapter is the theoretical discussion on the scope of protection and restriction of the public figure’s right to privacy. Beginning with putting forward basic principles, this part dissertates on the different protection and restriction scope of different public figures. The fundamental source of the legitimacy to limit the public figure’s right to privacy is the principle of profit measurement, and the presumption of the alienation of right should be taken into account according to the different types of public figures. And public interest and reasonable public curiousness are the final judgment standard. According to the different types, the degree of restriction on the right to privacy due to the public interest and reasonable public curiousness is different.The forth chapter is the study of comparative law on the right to privacy of public figure. This part points out the legislative defects on the protection of public figure’s right to privacy in China, and introduces the legislation on this issue in the U.S, Germany and the United Kingdom, and then sums up the experiences we can learn from them.The fifth chapter is about the perfection of legal protection and restriction of the public figure’s right to privacy. Considering the tendency of enacting Personal Law, combining with the above dissertation, this part puts forward the proposal of improving the legislation of the right to privacy, and building the frame of the legal protection and restriction of public figure’s right to privacy on the premise of distinguishing different types of public figures.