Intellectual Property Law Commons^™

The Terminator As Eraser: How Arnold Schwarzenegger Used The Right Of Publicity To Terminate Non-Defamatory Political Speech, David Welkowitz, Tyler Ochoa

Faculty Publications

INTRODUCTION

While it is no longer unusual for a politician to have been a recent celebrity in the commercial world of entertainment, the Schwarzenegger bobblehead case is one of the rare cases in which a politician has filed a lawsuit asserting a right of publicity claim. However, the Schwarzenegger case and its settlement exposed some basic flaws in the analysis of celebrity rights problems, flaws that are not unique to its political context. Two of those flaws converged in this case and are the main subjects of this article. First, rights of publicity claims frequently are used as a "stealth" …