The pandemic led people to work from home, connect from home, shop from home, and, for many, entrepreneur from home. With every passing day, people and businesses are more reliant on e-commerce and the internet in general, and, at the same time, people and businesses are more sophisticated about privacy issues. People are now accustomed to seeing cookies notices whenever they land on a website, and they are generally familiar with the idea that websites may be collecting data about them. Many consumers even know that they may have rights to control how a business manages that private information collected.

Believe it or not, there are no federal statutes or case laws protecting your exclusive right to the use of your name, image, and likeness (NIL) or any other defining factor of your identity, such as your voice or signature. Rights of publicity vary state by state, and as a result, these rights are complicated and little-understood. Recently, publicity rights (sometimes called “personality rights”) have been in the news—first for college athletes gaining the ability to profit from their NIL through a recent Supreme Court decision, then for the use of AI-generated clips of the voice of the late Anthony Bourdain in the documentary film Roadrunner. These two very different instances illustrate two sides of the multi-faceted issue of rights of publicity.