Image Rights: Where Protection Begins
A person's image — a photograph, film, video and the like — belongs to the sphere of personal non-pecuniary rights. The law sets the rule directly: a person has the right of claim also where their image is published without their consent. This means that publishing your photograph or video without your permission is a violation of law, and you may demand the cessation of that act and its rejection — even where the published material is factually accurate and did not offend you.
This right stands within the general framework of personality rights: a person has the right, through the court and in the manner established by law, to protect their honor, dignity, privacy of personal life, personal inviolability or business reputation from violation. The unauthorized use of an image is one manifestation of this protection — and it is exercised irrespective of the infringer's fault, that is, compensation of damage requires fault, but the demand to stop the use does not.
When Consent Is Not Required
The requirement of consent is not absolute: a person's consent is not required where the photographing or video recording is connected with their public recognition, with the position held, with the demands of justice or the police, with scientific, educational or cultural purposes, or where the photographing took place in a public setting, or where the person received remuneration for posing.
These exceptions are checkpoints of practical control. A frame taken in a public setting is one situation, and its use in advertising another: the fact of taking the picture and the purpose of its use are different questions, and being photographed in a public place does not always give the photographer the right to use the extracted image for commercial purposes. It is precisely legal assessment that determines these boundaries — and it is better that this assessment take place before publication.
Denial of Injurious Statements and the Right of Reply
Where statements violating honor, dignity, business reputation or the privacy of personal life have been disseminated together with your image, the law also provides informational remedies: where injurious statements have been disseminated through mass-information media, their denial must likewise occur through the same media, and where a document issued by an organization contains such data, that document must be replaced and interested persons informed of it.
A person whose honor- and dignity-injuring statements have been published in mass-information media has the right to publish responsive statements in the same media. In the context of image rights this means the injured party is not limited to a demand for removal — it can bring its own position to the same audience.