Legal Question in Intellectual Property in New York

Re: Right of privacy for First Lady

Of necessity, nearly every novel or play about a famous person will have some inaccuracies and fictionalization. Public figures have less privacy rights than non-public figures.

So long as the production is not libelous, slanderous or presented with malice, the rest is artistic license.

Why one would want to hold another up for ridicule escapes me, however, and a mean-spirited production could certainly backfire. I, personally, would not attend.

Re: Right of privacy for First Lady

I think that the First Ammendment rights wouuld protect your concerns as to Hillary Clinton and Monica, as they both have acquired the status of public figures and have a more diluted right to privacy and intimacy. However, such right does not license you to be malicious, slanderous or libelous about anyone.

However my concern would be for those people that are intimately affected by this controversy and are NOT public figures. One thing is to trivialize an historical event and another to distort it. At least in Puerto Rico, I don't know about NY, there is a tort against that type of action. That tort has been recognized when anguish, or damage to the reputation is suffered by a person that is not a public figure, and has not advented to that state through the publication of a non-slanderous story, when non-factual stories are published about them or that would be reasonable to infer that they might be those people.

I think that a research as to that issue would be in order before oficially getting involved with such production.