Backlight bleeding is a fault of the manufacturing process, so yes it is somewhat random like dead pixels. However, unlike dead pixels (which all panels have in more or less equal amounts), it's more preventable through quality control, so some panels have more and others have less on average. The Dell has been getting lots of attention for backlight bleeding lately, but that may simply be because Dell's the biggest vendor of LCDs. Or maybe the panels Dell buys really do have problems with it.