Monday, June 04, 2007

Want to be a Porn Star?

.. no? well who said you got a choice?

"A 17-year-old college student is taking legal action against a pornographic film company after it "stole" a photograph of her and used it on the front cover of one of its productions."

One wonders what her threatened cause of action is. Data processing without consent? Breach of confidence? Or breach of publicity rights in the US where the porn company is based (now THAT would be a fun choice of law case under Rome II if action raised in the UK..)?

Ah if only these cases didn't always settle ! :-)

The porn film company optimistically opine that they were "entitled to use the picture because Lara had put it in the ''public domain'' ". Would be nice to see that one laid to rest in UK case law.

(Thanks to Steve Green for the tip.)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well spotted Lillian!

Copyright infringement would be a good place to start I would have thought. As the taker of the photo, the poor girls mum would have to be the one who sued.

Anonymous said...

She might also have grounds for suing for defamation (the implication that she appeared in, or at lease endorsed, the movie.) Not sure what the jurisdictional issues would be; was the video available or promoted in the UK?

For that matter, if she was indeed 14 when the photo was taken then the producers of the video could be in a lot of trouble even by using her photo in a sexual context. I'm not sure what the US law is, but in the UK that is definitely an offence under changes in the law introduced by SOA 2003.

Jordan said...

Following on your comment's Simon, there could be an additional violation of 18 U.S.C. 2257 which requires record keeping by producers of 'actual sexually explicit conduct' of certain details by the performers. There are two points on this angle though. One, this is criminal law and not civil and two the picture on the cover would probably not be a 'performance' unless it was a sexually explicit picture.
18 USC 2257

Anonymous said...

Heh, brown happens. Such stories happened before to some porn stars as Carmen Cocks were called porn stars, but then they became real ones. So, wher's the problem? May be it's even better?