Can You Sell Products With a Celebrity's Name or Face on Etsy? Right of Publicity Rules (2026)

You found a clean illustration of a famous musician, dropped it on a sticker, and listed it. Sales came fast. Then the listing vanished, and the takedown notice didn't mention copyright or trademark at all — it cited the celebrity's right of publicity.

Most Etsy sellers have never heard of this right, and that's exactly why it catches so many shops off guard. You can clear your design against trademark and copyright and still be infringing a third, separate law. This guide explains what the right of publicity actually is, why it applies to your sticker shop just as much as to a billion-dollar ad campaign, and how to tell the difference between a product that's defensible and one that's a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Quick definition: The right of publicity is a person's legal right to control the commercial use of their identity — their name, photograph, image, likeness, voice, and signature. Use any of those to sell a product without permission, and you may be liable, even if you never touched a trademark or a copyrighted photo.

Why this is a different problem from trademark and copyright

It helps to see the three rights side by side, because a single celebrity product can violate all three at once.

Copyright protects a specific creative work — a particular photograph, painting, song, or piece of art. If you reproduce a photographer's image of a celebrity, that's a copyright issue, and it belongs to the photographer, not the celebrity. Our guide on selling custom portraits and pet portraits covers how source-photo copyright works in more depth.

Trademark protects brand identifiers that indicate the source of goods — a band's logo, a tour name, an officially licensed merch line. Many celebrities register their names and signatures as trademarks for merchandise. That's the angle our Taylor Swift merchandise guide focuses on.

Right of publicity protects the person themselves — the commercial value of who they are. It doesn't matter whether you drew the portrait from scratch, used a public-domain photo, or never used an image at all. If you put a celebrity's name on a candle to sell it, you can trigger a right-of-publicity claim with zero copyright or trademark involved.

That's the trap. Sellers spend hours doing a trademark clearance search and reverse-image-checking their source art, then conclude they're safe — when the most dangerous of the three rights was never on their checklist.

What counts as a person's "identity"

Right-of-publicity statutes are written broadly. Across the states that recognize the right, the protected attributes typically include:

• Name — including stage names, nicknames, and recognizable misspellings used to evoke the person
• Photograph and image — any picture, even one you took or generated yourself
• Likeness — drawings, illustrations, caricatures, look-alikes, and AI renderings
• Voice — including impersonations and, increasingly, AI voice clones
• Signature
• Other identifying characteristics — a catchphrase, a distinctive look, or a persona closely tied to the person

The "likeness" prong is what surprises sellers most. A hand-drawn illustration that is unmistakably a particular athlete is a likeness. So is a stylized, low-poly, or "minimalist line art" version, if a reasonable buyer would recognize who it is. The fact that you created the artwork protects you on copyright — it does nothing for you on publicity.

It's state law, and it varies a lot

There is no single federal right of publicity in the United States. It's a patchwork of state statutes and common law, which means the protection a celebrity has depends largely on where they (or their estate) are domiciled, and where you're selling.

A few of the heavy hitters:

• California has both a statute (Cal. Civ. Code § 3344) for living people and a separate post-mortem statute (§ 3344.1) protecting deceased "personalities" for 70 years after death. This matters because so many entertainers are California-based.
• New York protects name, portrait, picture, and voice under Civil Rights Law §§ 50–51, and added a post-mortem right for deceased performers and public figures.
• Tennessee — home of the music industry — has long had a strong post-mortem right (the Personal Rights Protection Act, originally driven by the Elvis Presley estate). In 2024 it passed the ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act), which expressly added voice to the protected attributes and extended protection to AI-generated digital replicas. It took effect July 1, 2024.
• Indiana has one of the broadest statutes in the country, covering a long list of attributes and lasting 100 years after death.

The deceased-celebrity myth: Plenty of sellers assume that once a star has passed away, their image is fair game. It is not. In states like California, Tennessee, and Indiana, post-mortem publicity rights are actively enforced by estates and licensing companies — often more aggressively than living celebrities enforce their own, because the estate's entire revenue model is licensing.

The 2024–2026 wave of legislation has only widened the exposure. Following Tennessee's ELVIS Act, states including California, New York, Texas, and Illinois have introduced or strengthened laws targeting digital replicas and AI-generated likenesses, many of them creating private rights of action and enhanced penalties. If your shop leans on AI tools to generate "inspired by" portraits of real people, read our companion piece on selling AI art on Etsy — the publicity-rights risk stacks on top of everything covered there.

How this plays out on Etsy specifically

Etsy's intellectual property policy isn't limited to copyright and trademark. Rights holders — including celebrities, their estates, and the licensing agencies that represent them — can and do report listings that misappropriate a person's identity. When Etsy receives a valid complaint, it removes the listing, and repeated reports put your whole shop at risk.

The mechanics are the same brutal mechanics that govern every IP complaint on the platform: removal is fast, the appeal process is slow and uncertain, and a pattern of complaints can lead to suspension. If you've never seen how that escalation works, our breakdown of how many IP complaints it takes before Etsy suspends a shop is worth reading before you list anything in this category.

Two things make publicity claims especially dangerous on Etsy:

First, celebrity teams monitor the platform. Major entertainers and athletes use brand-protection services that crawl marketplaces for unauthorized merch. A small shop is not invisible to them — automated tools don't care about your follower count.

Second, the "fan art" framing offers no protection. Sellers routinely write "fan art, not affiliated" in their listings and believe it shields them. It doesn't. A disclaimer can occasionally help with trademark confusion, but the right of publicity is about commercial use of identity, not about whether buyers think the product is official. We cover why this assumption fails in the "not affiliated" disclaimer myth.

The defenses — and why they're narrower than you think

There are genuine First Amendment limits on the right of publicity, but they're narrower than most sellers hope.

Newsworthiness and editorial use. Reporting on, commenting on, or critiquing a public figure is protected. But that protection is about expression, not about slapping a face on a coffee mug. The moment the use is primarily to sell a consumer product, the editorial defense weakens dramatically.

Transformative use. Courts (most influentially in California's Comedy III Productions v. Gary Saderup decision) ask whether a work adds significant creative transformation, or whether it's essentially a literal depiction trading on the celebrity's fame. A realistic charcoal portrait of a celebrity sold on a t-shirt failed that test. By contrast, a work that uses the person as raw material for genuine new commentary or parody has a stronger footing. Our parody products guide digs into where that line tends to fall — and how often sellers misjudge it.

Parody and satire can qualify as transformative, but the bar is real artistic or critical transformation, not just adding a joke caption to a recognizable face.

The practical reality: these defenses are decided by courts after you've already been sued or had your shop disrupted. They are reasons a lawyer might win a case, not green lights to list freely. For a working seller, the smarter question isn't "could I win in court?" — it's "will this trigger a complaint that costs me my shop?"

A practical risk ladder for sellers

Here's how to think about specific products, from most dangerous to most defensible.

High risk — avoid:

• A celebrity's photograph, portrait, or recognizable illustrated likeness on any product (shirts, stickers, prints, mugs, pins, phone cases)
• A celebrity's name or signature used as the selling point of a product ("[Celebrity Name] candle," "[Athlete] inspired tee")
• Anything depicting a deceased star from California, Tennessee, Indiana, or New York — the estates are the most litigious players in this space
• AI-generated portraits or voice content built on a real person's identity

Medium risk — proceed only with real caution and ideally legal advice:

• Genuinely transformative artwork that uses a public figure as the basis for original commentary, parody, or political speech
• Products referencing a public figure in a clearly editorial or critical context

Lower risk:

• Public-domain characters and historical works (note: this is about characters, not living/recent real people — see selling public-domain characters for the separate traps there)
• Generic designs that don't evoke any identifiable real person
• Licensed merchandise, where you hold a written license from the celebrity or their representatives

The only true green light is a license. If you want to build a real business around a particular person's identity, the path is to obtain permission — usually through their licensing agent. Everything else is a calculated risk you're taking with your shop's survival.

What to do if you get a publicity complaint

If a listing gets pulled or you receive a notice citing right of publicity rather than copyright or trademark, treat it seriously and resist the urge to relist a tweaked version.

Pull every other listing in your shop that uses the same person's identity before a single complaint becomes a pattern. Document what you created and where your source material came from. Do not assume the "fan art" or "not affiliated" language helped you — it almost certainly did not. And if the claimant is a celebrity estate or a licensing agency, understand that you're dealing with a party whose business is enforcement; a calm, prompt response and removal is usually far wiser than a fight. Our framework on whether to fight or accept an IP complaint walks through that decision systematically.

The bottom line

The right of publicity is the IP risk Etsy sellers least expect and most often violate. It's separate from copyright and trademark, it protects names and likenesses and now voices, it survives death in the states that matter most, and no disclaimer makes it disappear. If your shop sells anything built on a real, identifiable person, you need to clear it against this right specifically — not just assume your hand-drawn art or public-domain photo keeps you safe.

The sellers who stay open long-term are the ones who treat IP compliance as a system, not a guess: check before you list, monitor for complaints, and react fast and correctly when one lands.

ShieldMyShop helps Etsy sellers catch IP risks — across copyright, trademark, and right of publicity — before they become takedowns and suspensions. Start your free trial and scan your shop for the risks you didn't know to look for.

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This article is general information, not legal advice. Right-of-publicity law varies significantly by state and changes frequently. For decisions about a specific product, consult an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.