A lot of places I’ve been to have pictures of celebrities that visited them displayed all over the wall and anyone can see it. Oh but I agree that this is all about marketing. Would you feel any different if this was printing on a roadside billboard? Remember too: Twitter is potentially the biggest billboard in the world. You are not even remotely showing that all those celebrities endorse you but rather that the place is sought by the famous as a whole. But if they tweeted frequently about different celebrities shopping at their stores then it’s not a problem. If it’s an everyday thing then I would have a problem indeed. What would you say if the store did this every day with a new celeb or semi-famous person? Would each one only be a statement of fact? The fact that I sometimes buy at Walmart doesn’t mean I like it above all else or endorse all its policies (although I will avoid buying there if there’s a strong motive – ie: I’m avoiding some clothing brands due to use of slave work). Endorsements need the person to say his/herself that she ‘only buys at X’. It’s really easy to see that this is an attempt to imply endorsement. Collapse replies (9) Reply View in chronology As soon as you add the persons image and try to gain benefit by association, you cross the line in trying to imply endorsement. The guy could have stated it as a fact “This celeb was in our store today!” and nobody would have said anything – except that maybe other celebs would stay away. Otherwise, big companies would make sure that every store took super hi res images of everyone who came in, and would make ads with anyone even remotely famous that came in. There is no benefit for the store to post up your image saying “That One Guy shops with us”, but there is plenty of potential benefit of associating their store and their brand with a famous person and their “brand” as it were. It’s the perfect example of attempting to gain benefit by association with someone famous (and their image). When you look at the case, you have to remember that dozen (maybe thousands) of people have shopped there, but since they were not famous, there was no advantage for the store to put up a picture and make a post about it. Somehow that resulted in the store having to settle and contribute to a celebrity’s charity of choice? Come on now. It was a picture of Heigl shopping at a store. Publicity rights are beginning to result in ever-more ramped-up legal cases that anyone with a modicum of common sense will recognize as silly. Either way, it’s sort of a shame to see the company run away from challenging the insanity of the claims in the original lawsuit. There’s no way to be sure that Duane Reade didn’t drop six million off at Heigl’s charity, but I doubt it. The parties have agreed to keep the terms of the agreement confidential.” Heigl has voluntarily dismissed her lawsuit, and Duane Reade has made a contribution to benefit the Jason Debus Heigl Foundation. “Katherine Heigl and Duane Reade have worked out a mutually beneficial agreement,” says Peter Haviland at Ballard Spahr.

No terms were revealed in court papers, but Heigl’s attorney provides at least some detail. The dismissal comes with prejudice, meaning that Heigl can’t later sue again over Duane Reade’s tweet and Facebook post. Papers to dismiss the lawsuit were submitted in New York federal court on Tuesday. Well, the lawsuit has now been voluntarily dropped with prejudice, along with news that Duane Reade has reached some sort of super-secret agreement with Heigl. While Heigl also claimed that this was a form of advertising, it’s still just the accurate representation of something that occurred, which makes the whole advertising claim sort of silly. Under the auspices of publicity rights and the corollary idea that celebrities are simply better people with more legal privileges than the rest of us, Heigl wanted six- million dollars for the following tweet.Īt the time, we noted that despite New York publicity rights laws being among the most tyrannical, it seemed strange for a lawsuit to be filed against a company simply for showing, you know, a thing that happened. Thu, Aug 28th 2014 08:40pm - Timothy Geignerīack in April, I wrote to inform you of the crazy-pants lawsuit filed by Katherine Heigl after Duane Reade, a drug store chain, tweeted out a photo of Heigl shopping at one of its stores.

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