famous for fifteen people

Casting aside Andy Warhol's obsession with time, Momus said that on the web everyone would be famous for fifteen people. The celebritisation of life made possible by the social networks, instant communication and interactivity of web 2.0 has altered the way that we think about ourselves, our friends and our relationship to public spaces. As danah boyd has said, digital natives are the first generation to grow up living in celebrity-style publics.

Thinking about the web and the celebritisation of identity online reminds me of the shift from privacy rights to publicity rights. Publicity rights - a kind of IPR over aspects of your identity - developed out of privacy rights to allow the famous (and infamous) to determine how and by who profits could be derived from their celebrity. While, like other IPRs, they were generally justified by the invocation of Lockean labour theory (you invest time and energy in building a marketable celebrity identity, therefore you should be economically rewarded with a quasi monopoly), they also function as a trade off: celebrities, in pursuing fame, were considered to have traded away their rights of privacy for the more limited (but far more financially rewarding) right of publicity. 

Reflecting on this history in the context of networked publics is complicated. We see, again, users choosing to sacrifice personal privacy for the more financially (or socially) rewarding trope of publicity; and monetizing that publicity in various ways: mommy bloggers, publicising their family lives in exchange for sponsors; twitterers with high klout scores using their fame to endorse product to their legion of followers.

So what does this mean? Are we evolving out of privacy, as Mark Zuckerberg alleges? Are we all trading away our privacy rights for publicity, and, if so, how should the law respond? Currently, many jurisdictions only provide publicity rights to celebrities. In Australia, where the 'right' is protected through passing off (which adds the additional hurdle of consumer deception) it is difficult to see how the everyday netizen could access the protection. And even if law reform was realistic (the ALRC has been recommending various reforms in this arena since 1984), I can't help but wonder whether 'evolving' our law to more actively support and protect the commodification of all Australians is necessarily a good thing. Is trading away our (as yet unelaborated) privacy rights a reasonable bargain?