In 1993, Vanna White won a lawsuit against Samsung Electronics over their use of a humorous ad featuring a robot turning letters on a game show. The decision was later affirmed by the Ninth Circuit. The issue was over the property right to publicity. The court ruled in favor of White's claim of a right to her property of publicity. This case has been widely criticized by property lawyers who cite the dissenting opinion by Judge Kozinski, from the denial of a rehearing en banc, which stated, among other things, that
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Overprotecting intellectual property is as harmful as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it's supposed to nurture.
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