Posts Tagged ‘Forbes’

A wry smile crossed my lips when I heard the news that lawyers have applied for a court order to force Twitter to hand over the person behind the whistleblower account. It’s taken one anonymous tweeter to spectacularly out the famous footballer hiding behind his privacy injunction and, in a heartbeat, neuter the legal profession. Now blood lusting lawyers crave a sacrifice: a public crucifixion to warn others not to engage in mass collaboration with total strangers on the web.

I have always believed there has been a calculus of public vs. private interest, but this week has proved that the law is broken. The wider world is not interested in the deliberations of a dusty-wigged UK high court judge. The legal framework must try and understand the new age of free, libertarian speech especially when they are considering a celebrity’s position on his or her commercial value. There appears to be a very obvious point: the law is useless! It’s broken and unenforceable. Read the rest of this entry »

About a month ago, I wrote a blog on brand immortality and the way that people are exploiting dead celebrities to generate vast amounts of money in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death. Now, as the world gears up for This Is It, a film of Jackson rehearsals, CNN have come out with a report detailing what seems like the beginnings of a cult of dead celeb exploitation – there are even “death hags” who tour the sites of their favourite stars’ deathplaces, always on the lookout for morbid curiosities to buy.

Last year’s top-earning dead celebrities, according to Forbes magazine’s forthcoming report, are Elvis Presley, Charles M. Schulz, Heath Ledger, Albert Einstein, Aaron Spelling, Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), John Lennon, Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, James Dean, and Marvin Gaye, who earned a combined $194 million in 2008.

It’s a revealing article, and it makes me think I may not have gone far enough with my predictions of the exploitations of dead stars that are to come.

To read my original blog, click here. To read the CNN report in full, click here.