Selling the Artist, Not the Art: Using Personal Brand Concepts to Reform Copyright Law for the Social Media Age

In Part I of this Note, I’ll explain how internet creators, ordinary users, companies, and social media influencers operate under the current system of formal copyright law and informal norms. What they appear to want out of an attendant legal regime looks more like personal brand protection, specifically in so far as it encompasses the attribution right and the ability to monetize their whole oeuvre rather than specific content. In Part II, I’ll discuss privately ordered methods of enforcing the rights that creators seem to want, before explaining that these methods are insufficient to meet creators’ needs. Finally, in Part III, I’ll outline a path to greater protection of attribution and integrity rights by way of promising judicial developments, which would provide more robust protection than current norms.