Law360, New York (June 15, 2015, 11:34 AM EDT) -- There is an inherent tension between publicity rights, which guard against the appropriation of names and likenesses, and First Amendment protections that can attach to the use of those same names and likenesses in expressive works. In recent years, those competing interests have repeatedly butted up against one another in the context of video games that used the names and likenesses of celebrities and athletes in creating the avatars that populate the video game worlds. And although video games are entitled to the full protections of the First Amendment, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass'n, 131 S. Ct. 2729, 2733 (2011), the resulting decisions have generally seen the right of publicity come out on top in those contests, at least when the individuals in question were realistically depicted. Those outcomes should be of concern to novelists, filmmakers and other content creators who want to refer to real people in their works, whether historical or fictional....