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Cinema is not a video game populated by avatars; it is a medium of imagination grounded in human imperfection.

But the court rejected the argument, saying that if an avatar was widely recognised to represent someone real, then attacks on the avatar also extended to the real person.

Its avatar is a cartoon man standing in front of a wall of dollar bills.

He told the court: "I felt he was able to get away with a lot of his activities because he was almost like a Twitter avatar floating around with no real connection to the earth."

And Hanks himself, that paragon of niceness, has only become a bigger avatar of American identity.