For years now, we‘ve been writing about the rise of publicity rights as a new(ish) form of intellectual property that was ripe for abusing. These are laws, usually at the state level, which were officially designed to allow famous people to block companies from misappropriating their image in order to suggest an endorsement. You can kind of understand how that type of thing might make sense, though you‘d think that certain existing misappropriation and fraud statutes might cover most of the really bad scenarios. However, over time, publicity rights laws have expanded massively, leading to some crazy lawsuits. In the past few weeks, we‘ve seen two specific ones that highlight just how insane publicity rights laws have become.

First up, a pair of siblings sought to stop another sister from writing anything about the death of their mother.