Some people are upset with the White House for throwing its weight around and making the Indiana Live Casino in Shelbyville pull its ad campaign showing a look-alike of President Barack Obama stumping for "change you can believe in." (Just read some of the reader comments attached to the story.) But the president is just exercising the same "right of publicity" we all have, which is the right to control or prevent the commercial exploitation of our own images. So far, 28 states have such laws, and Indiana's is considered the toughest. Our estates can even protect our images for 100 years after our deaths -- that's why we had the recent controversy involving an heir of John Dillinger suing everybody left and right. What got me about the casino story was this:
Dennis Gomes, an executive with Indiana Live parent The Cordish Co., came up with the Obama look-alike campaign. He said raising eyebrows was always the plan -- enough eyebrows, he hoped, to get a request from the White House to pull the ads.
"Sure enough, everything I thought would happen, happened," said Gomes, CEO and partner of gaming operations for Cordish.
So, getting the White House mad was the plan all along, eh? That must mean the casino people knew exactly how they were thwarting the law and just went ahead and cynically did it anyway. Listening to Mr. Gomes, some might even get the idea that those involved in promoting gambling are exploitative, degenerate fiends, but let's not be judgmental.
