A photographer can own every legal right to a photograph and still have no right whatsoever to do certain things with it. That distinction surprises people, including working models, because copyright gets treated as the whole conversation when it's actually only half of one. The companion piece on this site, Who Owns The Photographs?, settled the ownership question, that the photographer holds the copyright the instant the shutter closes, absent a signed work-for-hire agreement. This piece picks up where that one stops, at the separate, state-governed body of law that determines what can be done with the person inside the image, regardless of who owns the file itself.
That right has a name. The right of publicity is the legal authority to control the commercial use of one's own name, likeness, and identity, and in most states it exists independently of copyright, sitting closer to privacy law than to intellectual property (Cornell Law School, Legal Information Institute). It does not transfer to a photographer along with the copyright, and it is not something a model gives up simply by appearing in front of a camera.
A right that took decades to catch up with the harm
Publicity and privacy law developed slowly, largely in response to specific injuries that had already happened. American courts first recognized the right of publicity in the 1950s, and most states built out their protections case by case afterward, which means the law has always trailed the technology and industries capable of causing harm rather than anticipating them. That lag shows up clearly in modeling and boudoir photography specifically. At the corporate level, publications and agencies built usage agreements early, understanding that a photograph's existence and its public use were two separate transactions requiring two separate permissions. At the street level, that understanding rarely made the trip. A great many independent and casual shoots have operated for years on the assumption that once a photo exists, the photographer can do anything with it, an assumption with no basis in the actual law and one that has left the people most exposed by it, models working outside institutional protection, without a clear sense of what they were actually agreeing to.
Where the industry and the law stand now
The most visible fight over likeness rights today isn't about traditional photo publication anymore. It's about artificial intelligence, and the modeling industry has ended up at the center of it. An estimated 98 percent of deepfake videos circulating online are pornographic, and 99 percent of those target women specifically, according to research cited in ongoing federal legislative efforts (Senator Coons' office, NO FAKES Act). The Model Alliance has formally endorsed the federal NO FAKES Act, which would create a federal property right protecting a person's voice and visual likeness from unauthorized AI replicas. Model Alliance Founding Director Sara Ziff described models specifically as “the canary in the coal mine” for this kind of exploitation, given that most models work without union protection and their image is, functionally, their livelihood.
Congress has already acted on part of this problem. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into federal law in May 2025, criminalizes the publication of nonconsensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated deepfakes, and requires platforms to remove reported material within 48 hours of a verified request (U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce). It passed the House 409 to 2 and drew endorsement from more than 120 organizations, including RAINN and several major platforms. The companion DEFIANCE Act, which would create a federal civil right to sue over AI-generated intimate images, has passed the Senate but remains pending in the House as of this writing, meaning federal protection in this area is real but still incomplete.
What Virginia law actually covers, and what it doesn't
Virginia addresses this at the state level with two statutes that work together. Unlawfully disseminating or selling an intimate image, including an AI-generated or digitally altered one depicting a real, recognizable person, without authorization and with intent to coerce, harass, or intimidate, is a Class 1 misdemeanor under Virginia law (Code of Virginia § 18.2-386.2). Separately, Virginia created a civil remedy in 2017 that lets anyone injured by a violation of that statute, or of the related unlawful-filming statute, sue for compensatory damages, punitive damages, and attorney's fees, regardless of whether a criminal case was ever filed (Code of Virginia § 8.01-40.4). That civil track matters because it doesn't require waiting on a prosecutor's decision to pursue harm done.
It's worth being precise about the boundary here. These statutes govern distribution and use after an image already exists; they have nothing to do with who owns the copyright to that image, which remains governed entirely by the framework laid out in Who Owns The Photographs. A photographer can be the undisputed copyright holder of a photograph and still be criminally and civilly liable under Virginia law for how that same photograph gets shared. Ownership and permission are not the same question, and treating them as one is exactly the confusion this subject exists to clear up.
When the line actually gets crossed
This isn't an abstract legal scenario. In 2016, model Emily Ratajkowski publicly objected when photographer Jonathan Leder announced plans to publish a book of roughly 100 nude Polaroids from a 2012 shoot, images she said were never authorized for that kind of release. She stated plainly that the images represented a violation of the terms she had agreed to, and that women deserve control over when and how intimate imagery of themselves gets shared (Fox News). Under copyright law alone, Leder likely held every right to those images. Ratajkowski's objection lived entirely in the separate space this article covers, that consent to be photographed is not the same as consent to have those specific images published in a specific new context years later. That gap between what was agreed to and what actually happened is precisely where publicity and likeness law does its work.
What a release should actually say, and what protects a model afterward
A signed release grants specific, defined usage rights. It does not function as a blanket transfer of every future right a model holds over her own image, and any release that reads that broadly deserves real scrutiny before signing. Attorneys who specialize in photography and entertainment law consistently draft releases that name the specific use, the specific platform, and the specific duration, rather than open-ended language that could be stretched to cover anything (American Society of Media Photographers). A model is entitled to know, in writing, exactly where images can appear, for how long, and whether that permission can ever be revoked, and a photographer unwilling to put those specifics in writing is asking for a blank check the underlying law was never designed to give them.
If a photograph does get used or distributed outside what was actually agreed to, Virginia's civil remedy statute exists specifically so that decision doesn't have to wait on a criminal prosecution to be addressed, and the same reporting resources that apply to other model-safety concerns, including the National Human Trafficking Hotline for the more severe end of image-based exploitation, remain available here too.
Copyright answers who made the photograph. It has never answered who controls what happens to the person inside it, and conflating the two has cost models real harm for as long as photography has existed as an industry. The law on this point has been slower to arrive than the harm it addresses, but it exists now, at both the state and federal level, and it exists because a model's likeness was never the photographer's to give away in the first place.
Thank you all for reading.
Stay Creative, and Stay Safe.
Jeshua.