Digital Fire in the comments to the question is wrong in believing that:
My layman's interpretation of [standing] would be; Do you cops have
a real case here or are they just mad they got embarrassed and seeking
some type of legal retribution that has no chance?
Standing is a much narrower inquiry. It involves #1 if the thing that the complaint alleges was harmed was an injury legally recognized right, and if #1 is true, #2 figuring out if the person bringing the lawsuit was the person to whom legally recognized right actually belonged (or if the person bringing the lawsuit may properly vindicate harm to a legally recognized right because that person has a legally recognized relationship to the person to whom it belonged, like the next of kin of a dead person or a guardian of a minor).
For example, if you allege that someone breached a contract with you, you have a legally recognized right to enforce that contract right, and you are a party to the contract so you are the right person to enforce that right. But, your neighbor doesn't have standing to sue alleging that someone breach a contract with you in most cases (unless the neighbor is an intended third-party beneficiary of the contract). You have standing to sue, however, even if, actually, the contract wasn't breached because you were mistaken about the facts or your interpretation of the contract is incorrect.
Similarly, you can't sue someone for destroying my car unless you have some relationship with me that allows you to assert rights in my shoes (e.g. if you are an insurance company that paid my claim in exchange for the right to take over might right to sue the person who caused the damage, which is called a subrogation right). You have standing to sue even if it turns out that the person you are suing isn't at fault because the damage was actually caused by a meteor falling from the sky and not by the person you are suing actively trying to crush your car. You don't lack standing just because the argument you are making doesn't win.
Jen is correct in her answer that they have standing on the claims that they are pursuing, if they are valid claims on the merits as pleaded. But if there are flaws in the theories asserted, those flaws could give rise to genuine standing to sue concerns.
But, the question you asked doesn't seem to be the one you meant to ask, which is really whether they have stated a claim upon which they are entitled to legal relief if the facts are as they allege. The answer from bdb484 identifies some good arguments that these claims should not prevail on the merits. The right of publicity claim seems to fail on the face of the statute. The other three common law claims are also weak on their face even without considering standing to sue.
Still, there are also at least a couple of standing-like arguments to make over whether there was really a concrete, cognizable injury to the plaintiff applying Ohio's standing law to these facts.
Who Suffers The Misappropriation Of Likeness Injury (If Any)?
One argument that they genuinely do not have standing to pursue misappropriation of their likenesses claims is that when a public official is carrying out his or her official duties, his image and likeness when doing so, like written work product and other creative works he makes in that capacity, are really basically "work for hire" and that any right to economic gain from appropriation of their likeness belongs to their employer, the government entity, and not them. Getting photographed is part of the job so the economic return on anything that is part of the job belongs to the employer.
The misappropriation of likeness claims was originally developed when businesses used images of models in advertisements without compensating or entering into a contract to compensate the models. But if someone is paying you to do things that may involved being photographed or videotaped in public as part of your job, this starts to sound like a case where a model tries to sue for misappropriation of likeness despite being paid pursuant to a contract to model.
Maybe their employer has a misappropriation of likeness claim, but under this theory, the individual officers do not. Also, maybe even if any misappropriation of likeness claim is available for employers in general, maybe a government employer is not allowed to seek compensation from citizens engaging in constitutionally protected, otherwise lawful activity.
An alternative and related non-standing argument is that the misappropriation of likeness claim should not be allowed for public employees as a matter of state law public policy concerns, because it amounts to a claim seeking to be paid by a private party for doing your public job with compensation in addition to what the government is paying you, which looks like some form of graft or corruption or double recovery for your labor. This is particularly true if the employer has a policy of not permitting moonlighting or at least not permitting moonlighting during hours you are billing the employer for your work.
Is There An Injury To A Cognizable Privacy Interest To Invade?
There can only be standing to pursue an injury to your privacy interests if there is a cognizable concrete interest in privacy that belongs to the officers to protect.
In this context, that is a hard argument to make, and the state tort law also needs to be interpreted in resolving that question in a manner consistent with the U.S. Constitution.
There is a well-established constitutional right to film law enforcement officers acting under color of law. This right is critical to documenting violations of civil rights by those officers. The real strategic purpose of the officers in this lawsuit is not to make an extra buck from a TV appearance, but to find a back door way to discourage people from exercising their constitutional right to film police officers so it is harder to sue them for violating the rights of public citizens.
One way to resolve the potential conflict between the constitution and state tort law with respect to the invasion of privacy tort is to argue that a government employee in the course of official duties does not have any reasonable expectation of privacy while carrying out official duties in the plain view of members of the public.
If there is no legally cognizable privacy interest to injure in that context, then there may be no cognizable injury that can be harmed, and therefore there is no standing to sue, because there is no privacy right to injure.
One could also make a similar non-standing legal argument on the merits that a public policy exception or simple supremacy clause analysis should cause a state law tort to yield to a federal constitutional right. In the same way, there are certain kinds of defamation lawsuits that states are not allowed to permit because the First Amendment limits the scope of state tort law.
Why Care?
In General
There are good reasons to care about whether the problem, if any, with these lawsuits is a question of standing or simply a failure to state a valid legal claim on other grounds.
Standing is a question of a court's subject-matter jurisdiction. And, questions of subject-matter jurisdiction can be considered at any stage of the litigation, even if not preserved as a legal issue in the trial court or any other lower court.
Indeed, subject-matter jurisdiction is one of the few issues which courts are not only allowed but required to raise sua sponte (i.e. on its own without prompting) even if none of the parties in the case argue that subject-matter jurisdiction (including standing) is not present.
Subject-matter jurisdiction defects like standing cannot be waived. They can also be used to set aside court judgments or orders long after they are entered, when the deadline to raise other kinds of problems with a court judgment or order has long since expired. There is never a statute of limitations on contesting a judgment or order for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction on the part of the court that entered it (although if the issue has been actively litigated and resolved on the merits, doctrines like res judicata or collateral estoppel may prevent relitigation of the issue).
Standing in State v. Federal Court
Also, it is important to note that while in federal court, Article III of the U.S. Constitution (which applies only to federal courts) makes standing a U.S. Constitutional requirement, Article III of the U.S. Constitution does not apply to state courts.
In state courts, standing may be a state constitutional, or statutory, or common law requirement for a party bringing a lawsuit.
But, while standing is usually a matter of subject-matter jurisdiction even in state court (often with some narrow exceptions involving the legislative or electoral process), a state can allow people who would not have standing under federal law to bring lawsuits in state courts, and a state can also require standing without making it a matter of subject-matter jurisdiction if it wishes to do so, without violating the U.S. Constitution.
Litigation Cost Considerations
Also, most standing issues (and some of the non-standing issues) can be resolved very early in the case on motion to dismiss the complaint, rather than having to wait until evidence can be considered in a motion for summary judgment or at trial following long and expensive litigation, and if it can't be resolved on a motion to dismiss can often be resolved in a motion for summary judgment or an early pre-trial hearing.
This can dramatically reduce the litigation costs of the case of the defendants relative to some other kinds of defenses that may be valid and could be raised but don't immediately kill the claim dead.
