Marketing a “California Ethos” Doesn’t Support a California Publicity Rights Lawsuit–Boyden v. Hyundai

Damian B Oh, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons Robert (Bobbie) “Boyden is a skateboarding legend—known professionally by the nickname Casper—who is credited with having originated, in the 1970s, a skateboarding trick that came to be known as the Casper flip.” You can watch a video demonstrating the move. Boyden claims that the Hyundai Casper SUV violates his California statutory publicity rights. But his arguments to link the Korean SUV to California were too gnarly, so the case crashes out instead. * * * Hyundai introduced a declaration explaining how it landed on this brand name: the brand strategy team believed the name ‘Casper’ evoked youthful energy as it conjured up images of the child-like cartoon ghost and skateboarding tricks. The name also aligned with [HMC]’s other vehicles since [HMC] often names cars after geographic locations.”… “As [HMC]’s first mini-SUV, [the Casper SUV] ‘flips’ people’s expectation that the car will…