You do own your likeness, in the sense that right of publicity laws give every person in the United States some legal control over the commercial use of their name, face, voice, and other identifying traits.1Legal Information Institute (LII) / Cornell Law School. Publicity How strong that control is, what it covers, and how long it lasts depend almost entirely on the state you live in. Roughly half the states recognize the right through statutes or court decisions, and the rules vary widely from one to the next.
What Your Likeness Includes
“Identity” under publicity law is read broadly. It covers your name and photograph, and it also reaches your voice, signature, nickname, and any attribute that makes you recognizable. A singer’s vocal tone, an athlete’s jersey number paired with a silhouette, a comedian’s catchphrase — each can qualify when the trait is distinctive enough to point to a specific person.
The right of publicity is often confused with privacy, but they protect different things. Privacy is about being left alone; it’s what you invoke when someone secretly photographs you and publishes the image in a way that causes emotional distress. The right of publicity is a property right. It applies when someone takes your recognizable identity and uses it to sell something without your permission. You don’t need to be famous for it to apply. A regular person whose photo ends up in an advertisement without consent has the same core right as a celebrity, though celebrities are more likely to notice the misuse and more likely to have provable financial damages.
When Someone Needs Your Permission
Permission is required whenever your likeness is used for a commercial purpose, meaning any use directly tied to selling, advertising, or promoting a product or service. Your photo in a magazine ad, on a billboard, on product packaging, or in a company’s marketing campaign all qualify. Using a look-alike or sound-alike to suggest an endorsement also qualifies, even when the company never claims the actual person was involved.
The legal instrument that grants permission is a model release: a signed agreement authorizing specific uses of your image, typically for compensation. A well-drafted release spells out the scope of permitted use (print, digital, broadcast), the duration, geographic restrictions, and whether the images can be altered or composited. If you’re asked to sign one, pay close attention to whether it grants rights “in perpetuity” and whether it allows sublicensing. Those terms can send your image places you never anticipated.
When They Don’t Need Permission
The right of publicity has hard limits, most of them rooted in the First Amendment. Free speech and a free press depend on the ability to use real people’s names and images in reporting, commentary, and creative work, so the law carves out several exceptions.
News and Public Interest
News organizations can publish your photograph without permission if the use connects to a matter of public interest. That category is read broadly and covers hard news, political commentary, sports coverage, and even celebrity gossip. If you’re at a protest, a public event, or in the background of a newsworthy scene, a journalist can photograph you and publish the image. The line gets crossed only when an outlet uses a newsworthy photo as a commercial endorsement rather than to illustrate reporting.
Expressive and Creative Works
Artists, filmmakers, and authors can use a person’s likeness in paintings, documentaries, biographies, novels, and video games so long as the use has genuine artistic relevance and isn’t a disguised advertisement. Courts tend to ask whether the creator added something beyond just reproducing a recognizable face to capitalize on fame. A charcoal portrait faithfully reproducing a celebrity’s likeness on a t-shirt, with no creative commentary, is more likely to lose this protection than a satirical illustration that comments on the person’s public role.
Parody and Satire
Using someone’s likeness to mock, critique, or comment on them is generally protected speech. Parody trading cards, satirical cartoons, and comedic impersonations typically fall within this exception. The protection weakens when the “parody” is just a thin wrapper around a commercial product, such as merchandise trading on a face rather than actually commenting on the person.
Public Figures vs. Private Citizens
Public figures — politicians, athletes, entertainers, influencers — have voluntarily stepped into public attention, and the law treats their likeness rights accordingly. Their actions and images are more likely to be considered newsworthy, so journalists, commentators, and satirists have wider latitude to use their names and faces without permission. A tabloid can run an unflattering photo of a celebrity at the grocery store. A political cartoonist can caricature a senator.
That reduced privacy doesn’t weaken commercial rights. No one can put a celebrity’s face on a product or use their voice in an advertisement without authorization just because the person is famous. The distinction is between commentary, which is protected, and commerce, which requires consent.
Private citizens get stronger protection on both sides. Because they haven’t sought public attention, almost any unauthorized commercial use of their identity is a clear violation, and courts scrutinize even newsworthy uses more carefully. If you’re an involuntary public figure — a crime victim, a viral bystander, someone thrust into the spotlight by circumstances rather than choice — courts tend to afford you more protection than a voluntary public figure, though less than a purely private citizen.
What You Already Gave Away on Social Media
Most people have already granted sweeping rights over their likeness without realizing it. When you sign up for a social media platform and agree to its terms of service, you typically grant the platform a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable, worldwide license to use any content you upload, including photos of yourself. That language lets the platform repurpose, modify, display, and distribute your images without paying you anything extra.
You still technically own the underlying copyright to your content. But ownership means less than it sounds when you’ve already licensed away broad usage rights, and courts have generally upheld these arrangements. The licenses typically end when you delete the content, which gives you some control, but any use that occurred while the content was live remains authorized, and content that was shared or embedded by others may persist independently.
Read the terms before uploading professional headshots, portfolio images, or anything with commercial value. If you’re a model, photographer, or public figure whose livelihood depends on licensing your image, posting content to a social platform can undermine your ability to negotiate exclusive deals elsewhere.
AI Deepfakes and Voice Clones
Artificial intelligence has made it easy to clone someone’s voice or generate realistic video of a person doing and saying things they never did. The technology has outpaced the law in most places, but the legal response is catching up.
Tennessee led the way at the state level with the ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act), which took effect in July 2024 and extends the state’s right of publicity to cover AI-generated clones of a person’s voice and likeness. The law creates a cause of action not just against the person who publishes a deepfake, but against anyone who distributes AI tools whose primary purpose is creating unauthorized voice or image replicas. Several other states have introduced or passed similar legislation.
At the federal level, the NO FAKES Act (Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act) was introduced in both chambers of Congress in 2025. The bill would create a federal intellectual property right in every individual’s voice and likeness, extend that right to heirs after death, and allow individuals to sue anyone who knowingly creates, distributes, or profits from unauthorized digital replicas.2Congress.gov. S.1367 – NO FAKES Act of 2025 As of its last recorded action, the bill had been referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee and has not been enacted.
Existing federal law has proven limited in this space. In a 2024 case involving professional voice actors whose recordings were used without consent to train AI voice-cloning models, a federal court dismissed claims under both the Lanham Act and the Copyright Act, finding that copyright protects recordings but not the voice itself, and that the AI-generated voices didn’t create consumer confusion about endorsement. The court did allow state-law breach of contract claims to proceed, which reinforces the pattern that state law remains the more viable path until Congress acts.
Federal Backup: The Lanham Act
There is no federal right of publicity statute, but federal trademark law offers a backdoor. Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act creates liability when someone uses another person’s identity in commerce in a way that is “likely to cause confusion… as to the origin, sponsorship, or approval” of goods or services.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 US Code 1125 – False Designations of Origin, False Descriptions, and Dilution Forbidden If a company uses your face or voice in a way that makes consumers think you endorsed a product, you can sue in federal court regardless of what your state’s publicity laws look like. The catch is that you have to prove consumers were actually likely to be confused about your involvement; an obvious parody won’t trigger the claim.
Rights After Death
In many states, the right of publicity is treated as a property right that survives death and passes to heirs through a will or trust.4ACTEC Law Journal. The Post-Mortem Right of Publicity – Defining It, Valuing It, Defending It and Planning for It This post-mortem right allows an estate to continue licensing a deceased person’s name and image and to sue anyone who uses them without authorization.
The duration varies dramatically. Some states cap protection at 20 years after death. Others extend it to 40, 50, or 70. Indiana and Oklahoma go up to 100 years. Tennessee allows the right to last indefinitely so long as the estate is actively exploiting it. Other states confine publicity rights to living individuals, meaning the right dies with the person.4ACTEC Law Journal. The Post-Mortem Right of Publicity – Defining It, Valuing It, Defending It and Planning for It And courts have held that if a state didn’t recognize the right at the time of a person’s death, the estate cannot retroactively claim it — a rule that has cost some famous estates control of the deceased’s image entirely.5The University of Chicago Law Review. The Wonder of Two – Elvis Presleys Influence on Tennessees Common Law and Statutory Postmortem Rights to Publicity
If you have significant commercial value in your identity, or heirs who might, estate planning that accounts for the right of publicity in the relevant state is worth discussing with an attorney. Domicile choice, or establishing a trust in a state with strong post-mortem protections, can determine whether an estate earns revenue for generations or loses control immediately.
Photos Taken of You in Public
One of the most common questions about likeness rights is whether someone can photograph you in public without your consent. The short answer: yes, they can take the photo. Whether they can use it commercially is a different question.
Photographing things plainly visible in public spaces is constitutionally protected. Street photographers, journalists, and bystanders are free to capture images of people in parks, on sidewalks, at protests, and at public events. You have no legal right to demand that someone delete a photo taken of you in a public space.
The right of publicity becomes relevant only when the photo gets used commercially. A street photographer can display your image in a gallery, include it in a photo book, or publish it in a news article, all protected uses. If that same photographer sells your image to an advertiser who puts it on a billboard promoting a product, you now have a publicity claim, because your likeness is being used for commercial endorsement without your consent. The dividing line isn’t who took the photo or where. It’s how the photo is ultimately used.
How to Enforce Your Rights
Knowing you have rights is one thing. Doing something when they’re violated is another, and this is where most people get stuck.
The first step is usually a cease-and-desist letter: a written demand identifying the unauthorized use, explaining why it violates your rights, and giving the other party a deadline to stop and remove the material. Many violations, especially by small businesses or individuals who didn’t know better, resolve at this stage. A cease-and-desist doesn’t require a lawyer, but having one draft it adds credibility and helps you avoid accidentally waiving anything.
If the unauthorized use continues or has already caused financial harm, a lawsuit is the next step. Courts have used three primary methods to calculate damages. The first is fair market value, meaning what someone in your position would normally charge for that type of use; past licensing fees serve as a benchmark, and where you have none, courts look at what people with comparable visibility charge for similar deals. The second is the infringer’s profits: if the unauthorized use generated revenue, you may be entitled to some or all of it under an unjust enrichment theory. The third is damage to future publicity value, which covers the loss when unauthorized use cheapens your image or makes future endorsement deals less lucrative.
Some states with right of publicity statutes also set minimum damage floors, typically ranging from $750 to $2,000, which give you a baseline recovery even when proving exact financial losses is difficult. Statutes of limitation for these claims vary by state but commonly fall in the two-to-three-year range from the date you discovered, or should have discovered, the unauthorized use. Missing that window can forfeit your claim entirely, so acting promptly matters.