A Conversation With Benjamin Woollams, Founder and CEO At TrueRights On Image Rights Disputes

Why are image rights disputes becoming more common for brands and agencies?

The biggest shift is that disputes are increasingly about people rather than traditional brand assets. A logo or stock image is easy to manage; a person’s likeness – their face, their voice, their identity – is far more valuable and far more contested. The same shoot now gets sliced across organic and paid social, regional sites, retail screens and AI-assisted variations, to name a few, and a lot of that usage drifts beyond what the talent originally agreed to.

At the same time, athletes, actors and creators are tracking where their likeness appears much more closely than before because they know what it’s worth. So you have fragmented, expanding use of someone’s identity on one side and rising scrutiny on the other, mediated by contracts buried in email threads and PDFs. When a question arises, neither side has historically had a reliable way to prove what was agreed, and there has been no third-party mediator to enforce it.

What is the growing commercial value of name, image and likeness rights?

A person’s name, image and likeness have quietly become an asset class in their own right. US college sport is the clearest example: NIL went from effectively zero in 2021 to a market estimated at well over $1.5 billion a year, and that’s just one part of the market Add professional athletes, actors, musicians, creators and the estates of the deceased, and likeness rights are now a meaningful, recurring revenue stream rather than a one-off fee. Regulators are also starting to take notice.

In the UK, for example, the government is now reviewing whether to introduce dedicated personality rights protections in response to AI. Crucially, the bigger shift is moving from the single image to the underlying right itself: the ability to license a face or voice repeatedly, across markets and over time. That changes the stakes. When a likeness is worth this much, it deserves the same rigour we apply to any valuable asset: clear ownership, accurate records and the ability to prove and enforce what’s been granted. That’s the gap TrueRights exists to close.

How are outdated licensing workflows creating risk for both talent and advertisers?

Most rights still live across multiple spreadsheets, PDFs and inboxes, with the actual assets sitting in a separate library. There’s rarely one place that answers the basic questions: who can use this image, where can they use it, and until when? For advertisers that creates real exposure: running an asset whose usage window has quietly expired, or beyond the territory it was cleared for, and discovering the problem only when a takedown notice or invoice arrives mid-campaign.

For talent, the same opacity means appearances they can’t see and therefore can’t be paid for. In most cases, neither side is acting in bad faith; the systems simply can’t keep pace with how content now moves, and manual processes don’t scale to thousands of assets across dozens of channels. A shared, authoritative record turns those ambiguous, after-the-fact arguments into something both sides can check in advance.

What could better rights infrastructure and provenance systems look like in practice?

What the industry really needs is a single, authoritative record that travels with every asset. Each image or clip would carry verifiable provenance such as who appears in it, who shot it, what consent was given, and exactly what’s been licensed. This includes the term, the territories, the permitted media. Before anything goes live, teams could check in seconds whether the intended use is in scope, and the system flags it automatically if it isn’t. When rights expire, everyone knows.

When a likeness is used, it’s logged, so talent is paid accurately and on time. The simplest way to think about it is as a trusted clearing system with a shared source of truth that brands, agencies and talent all trust, with a clean audit trail behind every decision. That’s precisely what we’re building at TrueRights: infrastructure that makes the rights as easy to verify as the image itself, so good actors can move quickly and with confidence.

How are AI and digital media increasing pressure on existing rights management systems?

AI has broken one of the core assumptions underneath most rights systems, that there’s a finite set of known assets to track. A face or voice can now be synthesised or altered from very little source material, creating endless derivatives at huge speed and almost no cost. The scale is already significant: the number of deepfake files online jumped roughly sixteen-fold between 2023 and 2025, and close to half of US deepfake scams last year used a celebrity’s likeness.

Legacy tools simply weren’t designed for content that can be generated faster than anyone can log it. It leaves the industry asking two urgent questions: is this likeness authentic, and was its use authorised? Provenance is the answer. We need a verifiable signal of where content came from and what rights attach to it. Without that layer, brands struggle to prove authenticity and talent struggles to defend their likeness. It’s why rights infrastructure has gone from useful to essential.