Legal Question in Intellectual Property in Virginia

No one has a right to tape or photograph someone and then use your image for promotion, publicity, or commercial purposes. In fact, under the he law this is historically called the "right of publicity." That is, you have the right to control the use of your own image, persona, and even voice for the purposes of publicity, including advertising, movies, etc.

However, if the church or a company or any other organization decides that it is a part of their functioning that their choir should be taped and the worship services published or broadcast or whatever, they do have a right to decide that that is part of what it means to be in their choir.

So they woul dnot have a right to tape or photograph or publish or broadcast your participation in the choir without your consent.

But you would not have any right to stay in the choir and demand that they not publish tapes of the choir.

They could say that "this is what it means to be in the choir" and you could either accept or not accept.

If the church or a company or any other type of organization decides that "what they do" is perform choir that is taped and made availalbe OUTSIDE the four walls of the church, they can decide that this is what the choir of the church needs to do.

This can come up if a company wants to publicize its employees for advertising. You might have seen real estate firms or car dealerships that advertise photographs of their sales team, or other companies that show their staff in photographs. They DO NEED PERMISSION to use those employee's photographs. But they can also say "THIS IS PART OF THE JOB. If you work here, we need to advertise the company and help the company make money."

A church might very well decide that if they are to do their job, they want people OUTSIDE the four walls of the church to get a taste of what it is like INSIDE the church, invite people to come, adn encourage more people to join.

So you DO have a right not to be taped and not to have your image or persona published, broadcast, advertised, reproduced, or whatever.

But you probably don't have a right to veto THE ENTIRE CHOIR from getting taped or photographed.

If push comes to shove, the church could decide that it is an important part of being in the choir, so you can't be in the choir if you don't want to be taped.

MAYBE. MAYBE NOT.

If you talk to them about your concerns, perhaps many other people will feel the same way as you do. Maybe the church will see things your way.

I don't mean to paint the worst case scenario.

I am only laying out the legal rules.

Hopefully, if you talk things through with them, you will work out a cooperative solution.

WARNING: As a person and a Christian (not as a lawyer) I would encourage you to go FIRST, privately, to the LEADERS.

Don't go around to the members of the choir stirring up animosity and disputes and conflict. Not only would that be bad for the church and bad for your relationships, but it would probably poison the whole situation.

Your chance of working something out in a positive way would be hurt if you start with INCITING A RIOT among the choir, rather than going PRIVATELY to the leaders of the choir first.