Media law

The sixth entry is o direito de personalidade, and the English noun that offers itself is spoken for three times over. In ordinary speech « personality » is character: somebody has a lot of it, and two colleagues who cannot work together have « a personality clash ». In a newspaper it has become a trade. « A television personality » is a person known for being known, and the phrase is said with a faint smile. In company law it is a term of art with none of that warmth, because « legal personality » is the bare capacity to hold rights and be sued, which is why a company has one and a branch office does not. Portuguese keeps a personalidade for the first sense and builds this entry on the third, naming a whole class of rights — the name, the honour, the image, the body — that English law has never gathered under one heading. So write « personality rights » only where that class itself is meant, and otherwise name the right at issue: the reputation, the privacy, the image.