Texas Right of Publicity Plaintiff - No Jurisdiction Over Australian Defendants

In my Information Law seminar last year, a number of my students were intrigued by a case going through the Texas courts about a Texan plaintiff suing an Australian corporation - Virgin Mobile in Australia - for unauthorized use of a photograph of the plaintiff.  Actually, the plaintiff's mother brought the suit because the plaintiff is a teenager.  In the case of Chang v Virgin Mobile USA, LLC, 2009 WL 111570 (N.D. Tex. January 16, 2009), a photograph of the plaintiff, a teenage girl, had been posted on Flickr under a Creative Commons license .  The Australian mobile telephone company downloaded the photograph and used it in a series of advertisements for its mobile phone service.  The ads were only available in Australia on buses, billboards, and the like.  The plaintiffs sued in the Texas courts under the right of publicity - for unauthorised commercial use of the photograph.  The Texas court dismissed the case for lack of personal jurisdiction over the Australian defendant.  This basically leaves the plaintiff without a remedy, unless she chooses to sue in an Australian court - an expensive proposition.  Even then, Australia does not have an equivalent law to the right of publicity,  so such an action would likely fail in any event.  This suggests that people should be careful what they post, or allow to be posted about them, on media-sharing websites, and that they should take note of the license terms under which they release any personal material to the public.

Comments

[Evan Brown]

Thanks for linking to my post - Evan