Robot Vanna and the law

Google has endured more than its share of bad news lately, with public airings of some pretty dirty laundry at the Web behemoth.

But the site is still good for tracking down odds and ends of game show history. Like the gory details of White v. Samsung, a 1992 lawsuit that spawned large amounts of legal wrangling. The linked article rambles for dozens of pages about this dispute between Wheel of Fortune's Vanna White and the Sumsung Corporation. I unearthed this ancient tale because a Google search of recent game show articles turned up a passing reference to the case.

It all started when Samsung used a robot Vanna in an early 1990s ad. The android Vanna didn't show up in 2012 as the ad promised. But the human Vanna got (in my opinion, rightfully) p.o.ed that Samsung didn't pay her a dime for an obvious use of her personality.

After endless decisions and appeals, Vanna won four hundred grand from the corporation, and everybody went on with their lives. The moral of the story? Don't use a robot in your ads that looks too much like a real person, unless you've paid the real person for the privilege.

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