The Surgeon’s Canvas: Deconstructing Intellectual Property in the Art of Plastic Surgery

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_111How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Right of Publicity; Useful Article Doctrine; Informed Consent

Abstract

The rapid ascension of cosmetic surgery from a medical discipline to a recognized art form, coupled with the immense commercial value of personal similitude in the digital age, has precipitated a novel and complex intellectual property conflict. This essay undertakes a comprehensive deconstruction of the hypothetical copyright claim a plastic surgeon might assert over their transformative work on a patient’s body. It argues that while such a claim can be rhetorically fashioned through analogy to copyrightable sculptures, it is overwhelmingly constrained and ultimately negated by the patient’s superior and inherent rights of publicity, privacy, and bodily autonomy. The human body is not a passive canvas but a entity bearing rights, making the surgical relationship fundamentally different from that of a traditional artist and their inert work. This paper establishes this core three-way conflict between the surgeon, the patient, and potential corporate right-holders. The analysis concludes that the useful article doctrine, the primacy of contractual consent, and the profound ethical imperative of bodily sovereignty create an insurmountable framework where any surgeon’s intellectual property interest is subservient to the patient’s rights. Consequently, detailed and explicit informed consent agreements emerge as the paramount legal mechanism for navigating this fraught intersection of art, commerce, medicine, and the inviolable human form.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zixi Zhou
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/03/26
TI  - The Surgeon’s Canvas: Deconstructing Intellectual Property in the Art of Plastic Surgery
BT  - Proceeding of 2025 8th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1019
EP  - 1029
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_111
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-551-5_111
ID  - Zhou2026
ER  -