Ar po asmens mirties išlieka jo teisė į atvaizdą?
Whether a person’s right to image survives his death?

Summary/Abstract: A wide usage of images of the deceased, especially deceased celebrities, creates a legal challenge, whether or not the law should recognize the right to image for a deceased and what it should cover. It is undisputed that a living person’s personal right to image is legally recognized. The personal right to image sometimes is related to proprietary rights (f. ex., France) or becomes the proprietary right itself (f. ex., Lithuania). Legal clarity and legal expectations principles together with principles of equity, prudence and fairness require that both personal and proprietary rights to image should be protected after the death of their subjects. In the case of the proprietary right to image, two opposite interests collide: on the one hand – the public right to be informed, in this situation, once a person dies his or her persona “belongs to the ages”; on the other – if a person spends his or her life creating the value of his or her image, it must be preserved for the heirs, at least for some period of time. Thus, legislators of different legal systems, while trying to achieve the balance of these two conflicting interests, allow transfer of the proprietary right to the heirs with the right to use it at least for a limited period of time. According to Lithuanian law, a deceased’s proprietary right to image passes to the heirs according to the procedure of inheritance and becomes their proprietary right. Its’ term of existence and subjects, to which it can be transferred, are not limited. In the foreign legal systems a wide variety, regarding recognition of the proprietary right to image to deceases, exists – starting with rejection of this legal phenomenon (f. ex., Germany, Chile, Canada, except Quebec) and ending with the development of the “right of publicity”, which guards against commercial injury caused by depriving the celebrity’s heirs of the financial benefits of the exploitation of celebrity image (f. ex., the USA, Japan).

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