Discussion on the right to use the name trademark: Focusing on trademark disputes between idol groups and their former agencies

Currently, a big wave of Korean culture is heating up the world, which indeed contributes to growing economy of Korea. In addition to the income earned from sales of music records and movies, the marketing business using the names of celebrities also forms a big size of market. As a result, there were often legal disputes arising from the rights of trademarks including the stage name or group name of celebrities. In particular, just before the end of the exclusive contract, the agency registered the celebrity's name as a trademark, thereby provoking a legal dispute between the former agency and the celebrities. In this study, we discussed whom the trademark rights, including celebrities’ names, should belong to. In the first session, we introduced two examples for disputes in regard to the trademarks including the idol group names. To express our critical opinions on this, it was discussed that the current trademark law could infringe on the personal rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Furthermore, our opinions to reasonably compromise these conflicts between the legal rights were proposed as follows. First of all, we suggest that it is necessary to legislate the publicity right, so that the personal right of celebrities can be protected as the property right is. Because the process of enacting a new law is very difficult, we proposed another idea to revise the current law. Thus, we noted that some provisions of the Trademark Act and the Unfair Competition Prevention Act are needed to be revised for preventing the infringement of the personal rights, and also proposed our opinions on how to revise these provisions.