copyright privacy netherlands authorship
Dutch Portrait rights for persona
<p>I'm no lawyer, so the following is to the best of my understanding.</p>
<p>In Dutch copyright law there's the notion of portrait rights. This law specifies certain restrictions for the author of a photo/drawing/painting/sculpture/etc and rights for the person in the art piece.</p>
<p>For this to count as a portrait, it says that it doesn't necessarily need to show the face. It is enough if the person is recognizable, for instance from other body features, iconic clothing or posture.</p>
<p>I was wondering, with the internet being a thing, if this recognizability requirement extends to alter-egos/personas/main oc/etc. They and their likeness and character traits are a recognizable characteristic of the person behind that persona.</p>
<p>For example, if you have an account on a certain website (say YouTube or DeviantART) where you always represent yourself with a certain character (for avatars, emoticons, profile pictures, etc), instead your own photo. This character is uniquely used as an identifiable character by you (so not something like a character from a movie or a game). You then commission someone to make a drawing of this character for yourself. Do portrait rights apply in this case?</p>

<p>I am not sure about the scope of &quot;Portrait Rights&quot; under Dutch law. But the original avatar or character image would presumably be protected by copyright, in which case the commissioned work would be a derivative work, and so subject to approval by the holder of the original copyright. In any case, since this is a commission, the artist and client should have a contract in which they agree on what rights the client is purchasing, which would be a cleaner way of dealing with the matter.</p>
<p>Only if there was no such contract would there be a need to fall back on the Portrait Rights.</p>
