Issue Section:
 Editorial
In Western culture, one of the earliest myths dealing with what would subsequently become a literary topos is the one concerning Narcissus. Narcissus was known for both his great beauty and the disdain he showed to those who loved him. In the version of the myth as told by Ovid, Narcissus’s behaviour (particularly towards Echo) prompted Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, to punish him by luring him to a pool. There, Narcissus saw his own image reflected in the water and fell in love with it, without realizing that it was just his own reflection. Unable to fulfil his love, Narcissus eventually melted away from the fire of passion burning inside him.
If we now move away from the realm of myth to that of law, a similar feeling—of attraction and yet unfulfillment—seems to be present when we review the type of legal protection available to one’s own image. In particular, it seems that this feeling is experienced where no self-standing image rights protection is available. In countries of this kind, in fact, different tools can be employed to repress unauthorized third-party uses of one’s own likeness, image, distinctive features, etc. Yet, none of them – even when combined together – seems to allow achieving the same results (and with the same apparent simplicity) that, instead, image rights as (predominantly) an expression of one’s own personality and identity provide.
The contributions that we host in this first special image rights issue move from, indeed, the attractiveness of the idea that the law should protect against the misappropriation and misuse of one’s own image. Yet, they also share a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. This said – unlike Narcissus, who does not dare shaking the water out of fear that the reflection would disappear – the articles featured herein make concrete recommendations as to how the law could be improved, whether through more appropriate interpretations and applications thereof or its reform tout court. Any change, however, would need to be made, first, in a context in which several conflicting rights and interests are at issue, including third-party artistic and commercial freedom of expression (so that any intervention would need to be ‘surgical’ in both scope and objective). Second, as the articles on, e.g. deepfakes and revenge porn show, any such change would require considerations of different areas of the law and doctrines, as well as fast-paced technological developments. In a field, that of image rights, which puzzlingly remains substantially unharmonized at the international and EU levels, the challenges that, in particular, the latter pose show the need for effective enforcement tools and responses that, due to the very nature of such challenges, will also likely need to be increasingly transnational.
Our contributions allow us to travel from the United Kingdom to California, to consider EU, US and Russian laws, to appreciate the interplay between technological, public policy and legal issues, to review image rights in relation to street photography, sexual images and deepfakes. The common denominator of all these pieces is the awareness of the cross-border, interdisciplinary and potentially global reach of issues of facing legal protection of one’s own likeness.
Articles like those included in this issue contribute to what will hopefully become a deeper and more intense debate regarding the standards, scope and limits of protection of this category of rights. Narcissus eventually died while looking at his own image. The same should not happen to image/publicity rights, the protection of which appears instead in need of significant consideration by policy- and law-makers and courts alike, in order to revamp the role and functions thereof.
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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