Originally Posted by Joe Obenberger

A friend sent me a link to this thread and seems to want me to post.

OK. The "C" in DMCA stands for copyright. It's a federal statute dealing with something that's exclusively entrusted to the federal government, namely Copyright. States have no jurisdiction and no say in copyright.

The right of publicity is a creature of state law, incubated in early court decisions and state legislative acts.

These two areas of law converge in every posed photograph and every candid photo depicting a human being. You cannot safely publish any image for commercial purposes without securing a way past copyright - the rights of the person who owns the image - and past rights of publicity - the rights of the person depicted.

DMCA - passed by Congress and signed by the President - deals only with copyright liability.

That being said, things become quite more confusing when we look at 47 USC 230 which deals with "intellectual property rights". There is a division in the courts about whether the model's right of publicity is an "intellectual property right".