The Boring? Legal Context to Athletes' Self-Marketing Rights

You read it in the title: The following is for people like me that like to have at least a minimum of context information. As a digital marketing rights platform for athletes, the legal part is an important aspect of Colossea, answering athletes' questions like:

• What rights to which of my personal information do I have?
• What do I need to do to protect those rights? How can I make sure I benefit from them?
• And how can I defend myself when I feel that my rights are violated?

In the following, I try to shed some light on the basic concepts. There is no claim whatsoever included as to completeness or correctness of these information. In fact, the following is no legal advice and I have no license to give any legal advice. (But the legal firms we partner with do, that's why we work with them.)

That had to be said, you understand.

The influence of jurisdiction

There is an almost global (social) media space. Apps like YouTube, Instagram or TikTok on which many a marketing content production ends up don't seem to make much of a difference as to which country the watchful end consumer comes from.

Laws don't work this way.

In fact, looking at the United States as the biggest, western media market, laws concerning personal media rights don't even exist on the federal level. That is, there are no country-wide laws. Individual states decide, what goes and what doesn't.

In the USA and other English-speaking countries, what interests us here goes by the name of Right of Publicity. Let's look at this as an example, then see how it translates to other prominent, western nations. There should be at least some general pattern and that's more than you and me as athletes probably want to understand.

We can leave the rest to some future articles and, again, to the expert law firms that we work with, so you don't have to.