Let’s say your friend hires a wedding photographer, with the contract stating she’ll receive hard copies, digital files and the rights to a hundred photos of her wedding. The photographer takes 300 photos, the bride chooses her 100, and the photographer has 200 leftover photos, for which they own the copyright. The photographer puts a few up on the website, and before you know it, that embarrassing picture of you doing the chicken dance is displayed for the world to see. Even though the photographer owns the copyright and can legally display and even sell the photo without asking permission, you have a right to privacy and can ask that photo to be removed from display.

It’s not every appearance, however; if you show up in the background of someone’s holiday photos, and those photos are published somewhere, that’s an incidental appearance, so that probably won’t be considered significant enough to warrant the right to privacy. The right to privacy is also null in certain situations, for example, if the work is evidence in a judicial proceeding or a statutory inquiry, or if it appears incidentally in some other work, film or broadcast, or if the copyright has expired, or is assumed to have expired (for example, if the work is anonymous.)