There are some stories which are just so bizarre and fascinating that you can't help but laugh. Former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega has launched a lawsuit against Activision accusing them of unlawfully using his likeness in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
Noriega says Activision portrayed him as the "culprit of numerous fictional heinous crimes", and accuses them of "misuse (of his image), unlawful exploitation and misappropriation for economic gain".
Following the Wii U and 3DS servers being taken offline, Call of Duty Black Ops 2 and Ghosts are officially dead.
Call of Duty players are jumping into Black Ops 2 for the final time before its Wii U servers go offline for good.
GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 leap up due to summer sales
Wow, good games never get old I guess.
CoD will always be a beast of a franchise, and how awesome is it that you can just boot it up or pop it into your Xbox and play, MS BC is really a neat feature.
Oh brother.. Greedy people trying to gets chunk of the money... I guess I'll sue Ubisoft for having a character of me rendered from my Facebook profile into the game on Watch_Dogs.
The irony of Noriega complaining about unlawful behaviour.
Do historic figures fall into the same category when used for historic reasons as using the likeness of a celebrity?
good luck with that.
This is highly unlikely to go anywhere. There are laws against exploiting someones name or likeness without permission, but this situation likely doesnt fit the bill. Its also unlikely Noriega would meet his burden of proof for the required elements of an exploitation of name or likeness action.
There are first amendment protections for creative works. In other words, the First Amendment ordinarily protects you if you use someone's name or likeness to create something new that is recognizably your own, rather than something that just evokes and blatantly exploits the person's identity.
But hey, good luck with the law suit. Might as well give it a shot before the statute of limitations is up, right?
As dumb as it sounds, I actually agree with old Manuel here. I guess they figured it does fall under the public/political figure for purposes of parody or satire? I don't see any parody or satire going on in these games, so that would be a pretty thin argument, I think. All I see are false representations of him, or at least his likeness, doing things he never did and it amounts to little more than defamation. Noriega doesn't need any help with defaming his character. Developers have done the same for other public political figures, too, like Abe Lincoln, Napoleon, etc., in other games such as Civilization and many others. Didn't the old NBA Jamz games have some presidents in there too? At least NBA Jamz has a legitimate parody claim.