Guernsey Image Rights: Registering and Structuring

Guernsey image rights explained: the registered image right, who it suits, licensing, tax position and the pitfalls athletes and talent should avoid.

For athletes, performers and other public figures, a significant part of commercial value lies not in salary but in name, likeness and personal brand. Sponsorship, endorsement and merchandising income all flow from the right to use a person's image. Yet in most legal systems that bundle of rights is poorly defined, hard to own as property, and awkward to license cleanly across borders.

Guernsey took a distinctive step by creating the world's first statutory registered image right. The regime gives a public figure something most jurisdictions do not: a registrable, transferable property right in their personality and associated images. For the right person, structured correctly, it can bring clarity, protection and commercial discipline to image income. This guide explains how it works and where it fits.

What a Guernsey image right actually is

The Guernsey regime allows a personnage, which can be a natural person, a legal person, a group, or a fictional or joint character, to be entered on a public register. Once a personnage is registered, images associated with that personnage can be registered as image rights and treated as personal property.

The crucial point is that this creates a defined, transferable asset. Where ordinary personality and publicity rights are often vague and territorially patchy, a registered image right is a discrete piece of intellectual property that can be owned, assigned, licensed and enforced. That property characterisation is what makes serious structuring possible.

Registration is administered through the Guernsey register, and the right, once granted, can be maintained and renewed. It is a standalone right, distinct from trademark or copyright, although in practice a well-advised individual will use all three together.

A useful way to think about it is that trademark law protects logos and marks used in trade, copyright protects creative works, and the Guernsey image right protects the personality itself, the name, voice, likeness, signature and other distinctive attributes that brands actually pay to associate with. None of those rights is a complete substitute for the others, which is why serious talent and their advisers tend to assemble a portfolio rather than relying on a single instrument.

Why structure image rights through Guernsey

The first reason is clarity of ownership. By converting a fuzzy bundle of rights into a registered asset, the individual or their structure can demonstrate clear title when negotiating sponsorship and endorsement deals. Brands and their lawyers prefer licensing a defined right to relying on uncertain personality law.

The second reason is consolidation. A globally active athlete or performer earns image income across many countries. Holding the registered right in a single, neutral and well-regarded jurisdiction allows the licensing of that right to be centralised and managed coherently rather than fragmented deal by deal.

The third reason is succession and protection. Because the right is property, it can be held within a company, trust or foundation, planned for across generations, and protected and enforced as an asset in its own right. For estates where a personal brand will outlive the individual, this matters.

Holding and licensing the right

In practice the registered image right is usually held by a holding vehicle rather than by the individual personally. A Guernsey company is common, and for wealth-planning purposes the shares in that company, or the right itself, may sit beneath a trust or foundation. The holding vehicle then licenses the right to sponsors, leagues, clubs and merchandising partners in return for fees and royalties.

For this to work and to be respected, the arrangements must be real. Licences should be on arm's-length terms, royalty flows should be documented, and the holding structure should have genuine substance and governance rather than existing only on paper. Tax authorities in the individual's home country will look closely at whether income has truly been alienated to the structure or merely re-routed.

There is also a sequencing point that is easy to miss. The commercial value of an image right is greatest when it is registered, owned and structured before the major sponsorship and endorsement deals are signed, not afterwards. Transferring an established, income-producing personal brand into a structure once it is already generating large sums tends to attract far more tax scrutiny, and may trigger a market-value disposal, than building the structure early and licensing from it as the career develops. Timing, here as in so much wealth planning, is part of the substance.

Tax position and the substance question

Guernsey itself is efficient as a holding location. There is no capital gains tax, and the standard company income-tax rate is zero for most activities as at 2026, so the holding vehicle does not typically suffer a domestic tax charge on royalty income at the entity level.

That, however, is precisely where care is needed. The home-country tax treatment of the individual usually drives the outcome, and most developed tax systems have anti-avoidance rules aimed at personal-service and personality income that has been parked offshore. Transfer-of-assets rules, controlled-foreign-company rules, transfer-pricing principles and the question of where the value-creating activity actually takes place can all bring image income back into charge if the structure is artificial.

Withholding taxes on cross-border royalty payments and the availability of treaty relief also need analysis, and CRS reporting will apply to the structure. We are deliberately cautious here: an image-rights structure is a legitimate commercial and IP tool, not a tax scheme, and it should be built and presented as such. Home-jurisdiction tax advice is essential before anything is implemented.

Who it suits, and the pitfalls

The regime suits genuinely commercial public figures with meaningful, durable image income and a real cross-border footprint, as well as estates managing the legacy of a well-known personality. It is overkill for someone with occasional or modest endorsement earnings.

The most common pitfall is treating the structure as primarily a tax play. If the dominant purpose is to shelter what is really personal-service income, anti-avoidance rules and the courts of the home country are unforgiving. The second pitfall is thin substance and undocumented licensing, which undermines the property characterisation the whole structure relies on. The third is neglecting trademark and contractual protection alongside the registered right, leaving gaps that opportunists exploit.

How HPT helps

We help athletes, performers and their advisers assess whether a Guernsey image-rights structure is genuinely appropriate, register the personnage and image rights, and establish the holding company, trust or foundation that owns and licenses them. We coordinate the licensing framework, substance and governance, and the all-important home-country tax and reporting analysis so the structure is both commercially useful and defensible.

If you are weighing how to own and protect your image income, we would be glad to advise.