Peppa Pig Has Better Identity Protection Than You Do

Peppa Pig does not have a personality right. She has something arguably more useful: a legal and commercial architecture capable of recognizing that many different manifestations belong to one valuable identity.

Peppa Pig has a legal advantage over you.

This may seem an odd conclusion to draw from Hasbro Consumer Products v Công ty TNHH & Ors, the recent English High Court litigation concerning the enormously successful children's characters Peppa Pig and Wolfoo. The immediate dispute concerned copyright infringement, including the alleged copying of Peppa Pig sound recordings into Wolfoo videos.

But the case raises a much more interesting question.

What, exactly, are we protecting when we protect Peppa Pig?

My colleague Relani Belous recently made an excellent observation about the decision: Peppa Pig is not merely a copyrighted work. PEPPA PIG is a trademark and a global brand. The commercially recognizable Peppa exists through an ecosystem of characters, names, sounds, imagery, stories, merchandise and associated goodwill.

Effective protection requires looking across the intellectual-property portfolio rather than asking whether something is exclusively a copyright problem or a trademark problem.

I agree. But I think the case takes us somewhere even stranger. Because the law seems increasingly capable of recognizing that all these different manifestations belong to the same fictional pig.

It remains remarkably reluctant to do the same thing for a human being.

The Fictional Pig and the Real Person

Imagine that someone wishes to reproduce Peppa Pig commercially. They may encounter copyright in the drawings, animation, scripts, recordings and music. They may encounter registered trademarks protecting names, logos and other brand identifiers. They may encounter contractual rights, licensing arrangements and the substantial goodwill surrounding the character.

No single right is Peppa Pig.

But taken together, the rights architecture recognizes something commercially obvious: these different things form part of one valuable identity.

Now replace Peppa with a human being.

A person's face may engage one body of law. Their voice another. Their name may be registered as a trademark for particular goods or services. A photograph may be copyrighted—but often by the photographer rather than the person depicted. Private information may receive privacy or data-protection protection. A false endorsement may trigger passing off or trademark law. Other jurisdictions add publicity or personality rights.

The human being has not changed. Only the legal category has.

This fragmentation has bothered me for years. I have previously described the practical problems of image rights and asked whether the fragments of our digital lives—photographs, recordings, writings, interactions and other attributes—can collectively recreate something considerably greater than their individual components. My work on Guernsey's registered image-rights system was particularly interesting because its legislation expressly encompasses voice, likeness, appearance, expressions, gestures, mannerisms and other distinctive personal attributes.

Artificial intelligence has transformed that old theoretical problem into an immediate practical one. AI does not need to steal a photograph of you. It can recreate you.

McConaughey, Swift and Littler Are All Solving the Same Problem

Three recent examples demonstrate what happens when sophisticated advisers attempt to protect a human identity using legal systems that do not quite recognize identity as the object requiring protection.

Matthew McConaughey has pursued an ingenious trademark strategy. His portfolio includes sound and motion marks: even his famous delivery of “ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT” has been registered as a sound mark, while motion registrations capture short audiovisual manifestations of McConaughey himself. One motion registration goes so far as to describe his appearance, surroundings, head movement and smile, expressly identifying the person depicted as Matthew McConaughey.

It is clever lawyering.

But consider what we are actually doing. To protect Matthew McConaughey, trademark law requires us to convert manifestations of Matthew McConaughey into marks.

Taylor Swift is pursuing a related strategy. Recent filings have sought protection for sound marks associated with her recognizable voice and for distinctive visual imagery associated with her performances. The apparent objective is to create additional layers of federal trademark protection alongside the patchwork of American publicity rights.

Again, it is sensible. Again, it exposes the underlying problem.

As I argued previously in discussing Swift, layered protection gives sophisticated personalities more weapons, but trademark law was never designed to protect identity at scale. Appearance varies. Voices vary. AI generates endless variations. Synthetic content can remain unmistakably recognizable while reproducing none of the precise things that have been registered.

Luke Littler presents the same problem from the sporting world. I have previously argued that “trademarking Luke Littler's face” cannot really solve the underlying issue. Trademark protects signs in relation to particular commercial activities. It does not explain why Littler's face, voice, gestures, mannerisms and other recognizable attributes belong together in the first place. My broader work reaches the same conclusion: consumers recognize people through a constellation of characteristics that conventional trademark doctrine cannot readily reduce to individual marks.

McConaughey, Swift and Littler are not three different stories. They are three manifestations of the same jurisprudential problem.

We are trying to construct personality protection out of laws designed to protect something else.

The Peculiarity of English Law

This becomes particularly striking in the United Kingdom.

English law has long resisted recognizing a freestanding proprietary right in a person's image or personality. Instead, protection has developed indirectly through passing off, misuse of private information, data protection, copyright, trademark and other established doctrines. That can work extremely well when the facts happen to fit one of those causes of action.

Irvine v Talksport, for example, demonstrated that passing off can address false celebrity endorsement. But English law did not thereby recognize that Eddie Irvine owned his image. The wrong lay in the false message of endorsement and the consequent interference with goodwill. That distinction becomes increasingly important.

• An unauthorized synthetic Matthew McConaughey might not falsely claim that McConaughey endorsed anything.
• An AI-generated Taylor Swift might contain no copyrighted Taylor Swift photograph.
• A synthetic Luke Littler might reproduce his recognizable mannerisms without reproducing a registered trademark.

The more sophisticated synthetic media becomes, the easier it becomes to reproduce the person while avoiding infringement of the individual legal objects through which we currently protect that person.

My recent work on English law puts the difficulty rather starkly: English law can protect commercial reputation, privacy and personal data, but it does not prohibit unauthorized exploitation of identity per se. Generative AI exposes a gap because a synthetic replica can be recognizable and commercially exploitative without necessarily producing consumer confusion, disclosing private information or copying a protected work.

There are legitimate reasons for the traditional English caution. A sweeping property right in identity could collide with journalism, parody, biography, artistic expression and freedom of speech. Those concerns should not be dismissed. English courts have understandably preferred incremental development of existing causes of action rather than simply declaring a new species of property.

But AI changes the factual premise upon which that caution developed. The question is no longer simply whether someone should control photographs taken of them. The question is whether someone else should be able to computationally reconstruct a recognizable version of them.

Perhaps We Are Protecting the Wrong Thing

• Copyright protects works.
• Trademark protects indicators of commercial origin.
• Privacy protects aspects of private life.
• Data protection regulates information.
• Passing off protects goodwill against misrepresentation.
• Publicity rights protect particular forms of commercial appropriation.

All of these doctrines matter.

But none quite answers the foundational question: Why do my face, my voice, my gestures, my mannerisms and my recognizable patterns of expression have anything legally significant in common?

The answer seems embarrassingly obvious. Because they are manifestations of me.

That is where I think personality law must eventually go. Rather than continually adding stronger copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity and data-protection remedies around the edges, perhaps personality itself needs to become the organizing legal object.

That does not require treating a human being as a commodity.

Quite the opposite.

Personality should not simply become another species of intellectual property capable of being sold outright. It originates in personhood. Some of its interests are dignitary and non-transferable. Other manifestations can be licensed commercially. The economic value arises because society recognizes the continuing relationship between an individual and the characteristics through which that individual becomes recognizable.

This is the distinction I have increasingly come to describe as relational personality.

The protected interest is not merely the photograph, recording, dataset, performance or trademark. It is the continuing relationship between the person and the representational identity expressed through those manifestations. AI makes that relationship impossible to ignore.

A generative system can separate voice from body, gesture from performer and appearance from physical existence. It can then recombine those attributes into something that never happened—a new performance, conversation, endorsement or digital person—while leaving the human source entirely outside the process.

The output may infringe no single protected artifact.

Yet everyone knows who it is supposed to be.

That is the jurisprudential problem.

Back to Peppa

Which brings us back to Peppa Pig. Peppa does not possess a personality right. She has something that may currently be more practically useful: a sophisticated legal and commercial architecture capable of recognizing that many different manifestations belong to one valuable identity.

Human beings should not have to construct themselves into trademark portfolios to obtain the same result.

McConaughey's motion marks are ingenious. Swift's layered trademark strategy is commercially astute. Littler should certainly protect the valuable commercial manifestations of his identity. But their strategies also reveal the limits of the system.

The law keeps asking which thing has been copied.

AI increasingly asks a different question: Which person has been reproduced?

Perhaps it is time the law answered the same question.

Because in a world capable of reproducing human personality, the protected object can no longer merely be the fragments we leave behind. It must ultimately be the relationship that makes those fragments ours. And until the law recognizes that, Peppa Pig may indeed have better identity protection than the rest of us.