퍼블리시티권의 법적성격-저작권과 상표 관련 권리 중 무엇에 더 가까운가?

Abstract

It is extremely unreasonable that a new bill revising the Korean Copyright Act is trying to recognize the right of publicity as pare of copyright law. It's because of the following reasons: In US where the right of publicity first emerged and still has been strongly protected, the mainstream of academic discussions and actual legislations have been based on not copyright law but unfair competition law. The traditional justification argument for copyright such as incentive theory is not well compatible with the right of publicity which is just a byproduct, not the direct result from such incentive. Even though the Korean Copyright Act already protects the subjects matter (an actor's stage performance as well as a database) which lacks originality, it is quite a different issue whether the Act could also subsume the right of publicity. The individual provisions of rather the Korean Unfair Competition Act than the Korean Copyright Act is more related with the right of publicity. Some decisions by Korean courts implicitly took a position favoring that the right of publicity was belonging to the unfair competition law area. Therefore, the future legislation for the right of publicity should be done under the principles of unfair competition law.

퍼블리시티권(Right of Publicity)이란, 흔히 특정인의 초상(肖像), 성명， 음성이나 그 밖의 유사물(likeness)을 광고 혹은 상품판매 등 널리 상업적으로 사용할 수 있는 권리를 말하는 것이다. 사실 퍼블리시티권에 관하여는 아직 이것을 독립한 권리로 인정할 지 여부나 가령권리주체의 범위， 양도성이나 상속성， 존속기간 퉁 그 세부적인 법적성격에 관하여 우리 판례나 학설에서 많은 논란이 존재하며 명백한 합의가 이루어지고 있지는 않다. 이런 논란 속에서도 현재 주류적인 학설은 퍼블리시티권이 종래 인격권적인 프라이버시권과는 분리된 재산권의 성질을 가진 새로운 지적재산권임을 인정하고 있으며, 우리 판례의 주류적 흐름 역시 그러한 듯하다.