Licensing deals between videogame developers and celebrities for the use of the latter's likenesses in the former's products are becoming increasingly commonplace. These are activities that would be governed by the law relating to the 'right of publicity' in the US and by the law relating to the 'right of personality' in various continental European jurisdictions. However, no equivalent legal framework exists in the UK. This article considers the extent to which the relevant intellectual property frameworks in the UK prohibit or permit the unauthorised use of celebrity likenesses in videogames, in particular copyright law, the law of passing off, and trade mark law. The article concludes that, given recent developments within the law of passing off and the law of trade mark, it may no longer be untenable to suggest that such uses could be caught by these two legal regimes. In doing so, it also highlights how far the ambit of these two regimes has expanded in recent decades.

Licensing deals between videogame developers and celebrities for the use of the latter's likenesses in the former's products are becoming increasingly commonplace. These are activities that would be governed by the law relating to the 'right of publicity' in the US and by the law relating to the 'right of personality' in various continental European jurisdictions. However, no equivalent legal framework exists in the UK. This article considers the extent to which the relevant intellectual property frameworks in the UK prohibit or permit the unauthorised use of celebrity likenesses in videogames, in particular copyright law, the law of passing off, and trade mark law. The article concludes that, given recent developments within the law of passing off and the law of trade mark, it may no longer be untenable to suggest that such uses could be caught by these two legal regimes. In doing so, it also highlights how far the ambit of these two regimes has expanded in recent decades.

The continued accessibility of older videogames is threatened by the obsolescence of the hardware and software platforms on which they operate and the degradation of the physical media on which they are stored. This has made videogame preservation a topic of increasing concern to cultural heritage institutions. However, established preservation techniques, such as migration and emulation, raise numerous issues under copyright law, as they implicate rightholders' exclusive rights as well as protections against the circumvention of TPMs. This is exacerbated by the difficulty of locating the rightholders for a given videogame. Notwithstanding this, cultural heritage institutions may still take advantage of some flexibilities within the current copyright framework, in particular the exceptions relating to reverse engineering, decompilation, cultural preservation and orphan works, in order to begin the work of videogame preservation. In the longer term, it may be necessary for the sector to collaborate more closely with the videogame industry and to lobby for legislative reform.

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