The cited privacy cases never involved people who lacked consent rights

Evidence

The court’s insistence that the photographer, and not the photographed, owns the right to a picture is anchored in inapposite precedent. In advancing this argument, the court cited three cases. First, in Thayer v. Worcester Post Co., the plaintiff alleged that the defendant newspaper infringed on her right to privacy when it captured and published a photograph of her at an airport…. The Lanier court failed to acknowledge that these cases featured non-enslaved plaintiffs, rendering their legal status and circumstances so different as to be noncontrolling. As “chattel property,” Renty and Delia were denied a right to privacy, including the right to refuse to take part in the making of the daguerreotypes—facts the court erroneously ignored. There is no indication from Thayer, Ault, or Continental Optical Co. that a photographer would retain a property right in images of people who could never consent to be photographed. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 1341

Categorization

• XREF: Relates to how precedent built on free white plaintiffs fails once plaintiffs were legal chattel — connects to the reader’s broader interest in legal afterlife of slavery.