Experience Hendrix v. HendrixLicensing.com upheld Washington's post-mortem publicity statute as applied to a New York-domiciled rock legend, exposing how a fractured state-law patchwork now governs the dead.
The California Supreme Court's 1979 companion to Lugosi denied a descendible right of publicity, but Chief Justice Bird's concurrence on fictionalized portrayals of the dead became enduringly influential.
Why the Sixth Circuit held in 1980 that Elvis Presley's right of publicity died with him and passed into the public domain—an Erie prediction Tennessee would later reject.
How the California Supreme Court held in 1979 that the right of publicity is personal, dies with its owner, and is not descendible to heirs—prompting the statute that overturned it.
