Licensing the dead

San Francisco Chronicle: Licensing the dead. (Photo: Steve McQueen in a scene from "The Magnificent Seven," 1960.)

There is a bill pending in the California Senate designed to protect the images of dead celebrities. Essentially, SB771 will bolster a similar law enacted in 1985, devised to defend the "postmortem right of publicity" held by the heirs of famous people.

The bill would guard against the unlawful use of the likenesses, voices and even signatures of dead icons for commercial purposes. Naturally, there is plenty of opposition. If the bill passes, publicity rights held in the public domain for decades could be retroactively nullified, and the courts flooded with lawsuits. ...