A Study on the Right of Publicity as Content IP

Abstract

The right of publicity has no explicit statutory basis in Korea, yet the content industry treats it as a de facto right, and digital technology has steadily diversified the ways it is exploited. Legislative debate on the right has been active, but how the right is actually exploited has drawn far less attention. This paper addresses that gap by proposing a typology of the right of publicity as content IP. Arguing that personal indicia—name, likeness, voice, persona, and the like—fall within the scope of content IP, the paper adopts the degree of separation between the personal subject and the personal indicia as its classifying criterion. The criterion is articulated along two axes: the degree of participation of the personal subject and the degree of trans-formation of the personal indicia. Their intersection yields a quadrant structure, and an inductive analysis of cases in each quadrant identifies four types of exploitation: the advertising and promotion type, the persona type, the fan activity type, and the replica type. In practice, these types may appear alone or in combination. Because the typology rests on deductive criteria, even phenomena spanning several types can be analyzed through the structural characteristics of each.