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Right-of-Publicity Amendments Extend Protections, But Marilyn Monroe LLC Suffers New Setback
Los Angeles entertainment attorney Robert A. Finkelstein accompanied Nancy Sinatra to Washington, DC, last summer for a U.S. Congressional hearing on a proposal for terrestrial radio stations to pay performance royalties to air sound recordings. Sinatra was a key artist-rights witness before the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. (The subcommittee later voted to support the performance royalty legislation, then sent it to the House Judiciary Committee.) As SoundExchange Executive Director John Simson brought this author over in the Congressional hearing room to greet Sinatra and the long-time Sinatra-family attorney, Finkelstein praised a recent change in Washington state's right-of-publicity statute. The amendment, which took effect in June 2008, eliminated a personality's domicile as a bar to bringing a right-of-publicity suit.
The California-based Sinatra family had been busy licensing Frank Sinatra product to mark 10 years since the legendary crooner passed away. California had recently enacted a major change in its statutory right of publicity, too ' in response to litigation that involved the residuary rights of Frank Sinatra's late friend Marilyn Monroe. After federal district courts in California and New York ruled that Monroe had no ability to include a post-mortem right of publicity in her will when she died in 1962, the California legislature amended its descendible publicity right to apply to personalities who died up to 70 years before the California statute originally took effect on Jan. 1, 1985. But the amendment to Calif. Civ. Code Sec. 3344.1 hasn't helped the Monroe legacy. Both California and New York federal district courts have now decided that, though Monroe often worked in California, her domicile was New York, which has no descendible publicity right.
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