Add another personal security worry to your list: digital kidnapping, wherein your likeness could be purloined, then show up on the Internet unbeknownst to you. If you're lucky, your appearance there may be fairly benign. Maybe you'll just be playing tennis with Elvis Presley. In the worst case, you may be performing lewd or violent acts with persons or creatures unknown.
Virtual kidnapping was a hot issue at the Virtual Humans 3 conference, held Tuesday and Wednesday in Universal City, California.
Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, director of the University of Geneva's Miralab and a pioneering researcher in the creation of digital people, gained attention for her reconstructions of Marilyn Monroe. She has also recreated Presley and tennis player Martina Hingis. The Presley estate hasn't pursued action yet, but Magnenat-Thalmann was recently prevented from demonstrating a tennis match with Hingis because she didn't have written releases.
"When you do science, it's always at the last minute," she explained. "We simply didn't have time to deal with all the paperwork." Magnenat-Thalmann is an academic concerned with programming, not marketing. But intellectual-property attorneys are on alert now that Hollywood has seen the money.
"I think the single biggest issue ... is the misuse of the digital image, whether it's a living person or a deceased celebrity," said Joseph Beard of St. John's University School of Law, "What rights do actors have in motion-performance capture? What about post-production modification of an actor's image? Taking out wrinkles or age spots may be fine, as long as the actor's happy with the result. But what if they do something the actor is not happy with?"
Celebrities aren't the only people who can be electronically shanghaied, but they are more at risk. Luckily, they are also in a better position to guard against it.
Los Angeles licensing and merchandising company Global Icons plans to help celebrities protect and extend themselves as brands. Last week, the agency launched a sister company, Virtual Celebrity Productions, to create and market photo-realistic, interactive representations of stars living and dead. Even though no market yet exists for the buying and selling of personal images and brands, the company is frenetically inking deals. Bob Hope and the estates of Sammy Davis, Jr., W. C. Fields, George Burns, and Gracie Allen are already in the stable.
"The reason I've been able to get as many celebrities as I have is they're excited about the Digital Cloning technology," said Jeffrey Lotman, founder of Virtual Celebrity and CEO of Global Icons. Digital Cloning is his company's trademarked name for the process they'll use to digitally graft the head of a dead celebrity onto the body of a live actor. "When I explain that I can offer their [dead] grandfather the ability to do commercials and film projects, they're knocked out. Can you imagine doing a brand-new film with Marlene Dietrich?"
Lotman estimates that Virtual Celebrity will be able to do that in two to three years. The technology, still under development, would employ film clips to model the head and face and an actor of a similar physical type to mimic the celebrity's body language. Global Icons will advise on trademark and copyright issues as well as sales.
Virtual Humans 3 included a panel discussion dubbed "Digital Kidnapping" in which Beard and Lotman took part, along with Edward Rosenthal, partner in the law firm of Garbus, Klein and Selz, P.C.; Peter Riva, president of the International Film History Foundation and grandson of Marlene Dietrich; Steve Williams, partner in the Pull Down Your Pants production company; Ronald Fields, screenwriter and grandson of Fields; and Richard Masur, actor, director and president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).
SAG has not been blindsided by the new opportunities for misappropriation of personal images in the digital age; it's been actively addressing the issue for at least five years. "We have made some real strides with producers, with the government, and internationally in helping [people] to understand why this is so important," said Masur, who had just returned from a meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. "For the first time ever, the US government, the major producers, and the performers had a unified position, that performers must have the right to protect their images against misappropriation by unauthorized third parties," he said.
Riva said that Dietrich's estate has spent more than a million dollars since her death establishing and protecting rights to her representation. "Dietrich is not dead," her grandson told the conference. "To most of the world she's alive as she ever was." The task for the heirs of deceased movie stars, he added, is "to take these iconic performers, maintain their essences to the best of our abilities ... then find the new Picassos, the new creative people, with the tools to take this art form to the next level. It's our job as their offspring to maintain the flow of their creativity."
