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This information is taken directly from the court opinion. It is not taken out of context nor is it altered.

From Cardtoons v. Major League Baseball Players Assn, 95 F.3d 959 (10. th. Cir. 1996)

The right of publicity is the right of a person to control the commercial use of his or her identity. 1 J. Thomas McCarthy, The Rights of Publicity and Privacy § 1.1[A][1] (1996); see Restatement (Third) of Unfair Competition § 46 (1995). While the right was originally intertwined with the right of privacy, courts soon came to recognize a distinction between the personal right to be left alone and the business right to control use of one's identity in commerce. McCarthy, supra, §§ 1.1-1.6; Michael Madow, Private Ownership of Public Image: Popular Culture and Publicity Rights, 81 Cal. L. Rev. 127, 167-78 (1993). The latter was first acknowledged as a distinct privilege and termed the "right of publicity" in Haelan Laboratories, Inc. v. Topps Chewing Gum, Inc., 202 F.2d 866 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 346 U.S. 816 (1953). Haelan Laboratories, appropriately enough, involved two rival chewing gum manufacturers who were arguing over exclusive rights to use the image of a professional baseball player to promote their product. In resolving the dispute, the court concluded that "a man has a right in the publicity value of his photograph." Id. at 868. The court explained:

This right might be called a "right of publicity." For it is common knowledge that many prominent persons (especially actors and ballplayers), far from having their feelings bruised through public exposure of their likenesses, would feel sorely deprived if they no longer received money for authorizing advertisements, popularizing their countenances, displayed in newspapers, magazines, busses, trains and subways. This right of publicity would usually yield them no money unless it could be made the subject of an exclusive grant which barred any other advertiser from using their pictures.

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