If you need something to read during the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, Daniel Grant has written a lengthy, and slightly technical dissection of the developing morass of “publicity rights” and their possible impact on artists in the Huffington Post. According to Grant, there’s a developing, but still highly disorganized tangle of state laws regarding the rights of people to control and profit from images of themselves and while preventing others from doing so (as sample legal cases suggest, perhaps the more important right). Occasionally, artists who have used people’s likenesses in their work have fallen afoul of these laws, setting the stage for endless wrangling that pits artists’ rights to free expression against the right to privacy. Intellectual property lawyers are rubbing their hands with glee!