KAKA E

Barker White

MC-400 WED

Privacy: Chapters 7 & 8

What is privacy? What makes our lives private? Privacy is a law today that has not been known for very long. The idea of privacy that everyone has running through their minds is just to be left alone. In reality what constitutes the crossing of the privacy line. It wasn’t until 1890 when two men wrote in the Harvard Law Review about the “The Right to Privacy.? The two men were Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis, the two were young lawyers who had the sense to right papers on what they thought were Americans rights to privacy. After their ideas were published they attempted to pass their knowledge on to the court systems asking to make laws that would follow their papers. Most court systems did not accept there law until 13 years later when the state of New York passed the first privacy law. The law prohibited the commercial exploitation of an individual (Pember 240).

The privacy law that the state of New York adapted well and began spreading to many states but not vert fast, it took roughly 90 years to get the law spread. Mainly because the most of the courts used the Bill of Rights as a persons?privacy protection. To this day there are states that still do not have individual privacy rights. As our government more clearly defines our privacy rights then more states will join in on adopting the rights to their laws. Within the past couple years the government has developed for different torts that would accuse somebody in invasion of privacy. The torts are listed as following:

1. Appropriation of name or likeness for trade purposes (Pember 241)

2. Intrusion upon an individual’s solitude (Pember 241)

3. Publication of private information about an individual (Pember 241)

4. Publishing material that puts an individual in a false light (Pember 241)

From the time that these torts were declared as the rights to privacy the law became much more complicated than before.

The first form of invasion of privacy is appropriation and the book defines it as taking a person’s name, picture, photograph, or likeness and using it for a commercial gain without permission (Pember 241). In laymen terms a person cannot impersonate another without the permission of the person being impersonated. This tort is the biggest of the four when it comes invasion of privacy. Of all the torts, appropriation is the oldest and the most comprehensible until more has been added on. An obvious case to relate how the basic form of appropriation works it