The future producer of “Himbo Heist”: Studios have a commercial interest in them (the copyright owners in the film) being the owners of the characters so they can do things like recast for sequels. This also aligns to current law.

Remember when everyone was absolutely certain about the thing that totally happened and exemplified everything wrong with "AI culture" that ended up being...not what happened? www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

OpenAI didn’t copy Scarlett Johansson’s voice for ChatGPT, records showwww.washingtonpost.com A different actress was hired to voice OpenAI’s “Sky” months before CEO Sam Altman contacted Scarlett Johansson, according to documents and the actress’s agent.

Ari, this isn’t a great take. It’s still incredibly likely that they wanted to have people think it was her. bsky.app/profile/lega...

In voiceover work there’s a concept called a “soundalike” which is an actor chosen to impersonate someone more famous. My guess was always that this was what they did.

Ill admit to being not all that perturbed about soundalikes in general. I can agree that false claims that someone *actually* is the voice when they aren't is problematic, but it seems to be from other responses that everyone knew from the beginning it was a soundalike!

The point isn't if the people in the company knows, the point is what the public thinks when they market it and if they intentionally make it seem like it's her. Publicity rights don't work like copyright here

I did t say anything about what the company knows. Someone quoted the post saying "it's not news that it's a soundalike, nobody ever thought it was actually her, that's not the point." Well, if that's true....

Publicity rights cover likeness, if people who didn't know otherwise think that she did the voice then that's likely enough. It does not require convincing everybody she did the voice, it does not require direct copying. And apparently her own family thought the voice was hers.

I know what publicity rights are. And that's not really an accurate summary.

Is Wikipedia missing something? What part does not apply when they clearly wanted the voice to make people think of her? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_...

Midler v. Ford Motor Co. - Wikipediaen.m.wikipedia.org

Just because there’s an article on Wikipedia that’s kind of about an issue doesn’t make that article apposite to the topic under discussion. That judgment exists but isn’t really the state of the law on rights of personality nationwide.

I think Ari is understating the issue and that there’s a passing off claim to be made; especially after Altman’s ill-advised tweet, it seems clear that he wanted people to think this was the character from the movie. Does Johansson own the portrayal of that character? We need a judge to answer that.

I suspect if this goes to court we will see the Hollywood studios line up with Altman. Get ready for a lot of really stupid takes about how this is “proof” that the studios are aligned with AI developers. There’s a much simpler explanation.

Studios have a commercial interest in them (the copyright owners in the film) being the owners of the characters so they can do things like recast for sequels. This also aligns to current law.

There’s a fairly wide gulf to argue over in court. - Was the tweet referring to the concept or SJ? - Did Altman make the tie to SJ or did SJ do that herself? - If we all own our voices can a similar sounding actress be prevented from acting because someone more famous thinks they sound too similar?

Singing vs acting, but when Ava Max first dropped Psycho I absolutely thought it was a new Lady Gaga song when I heard it on the radio. If someone thought similar with Sky, I suppose the fact pattern would have to look at how much is consumer assumption vs intentionally false advertising.

Related to your third: the custom in Hollywood of actors taking a new name because there was already someone using theirs. (I understand this to be because SAG-AFTRA records are organized by name, but still.) As in: I bet there are things that actors and their lawyers think are the law but aren't.

I don't think studios should be able to do that for anything but distinct characters. There's already companies trying to effectively monopolize the rights to the likeness and voice of new actors for the smallest one time sum they can get away with.

If they didn't instruct how the voice should sound like, if it's not particularly distinct from the actor's normal voice, what even is there for the studio to own?

US law kind of disagrees with you. Character ownership only exists where the character is sufficiently distinctive that using the character is equivalent to using the work in which they were created. But the studio owns the work, as the owner of the copyright in the film. The actor owns nothing.

But if the character voice isn't copied because of the character itself but specifically because of the actor, should the actor still have no claim? In a case like The Simpsons with many distinct voices done by a few voice actors that makes more sense. People think of the character first.

But if a particular actor's voice is chosen to be mimicked and the character is incidental because that was just a suitable tempo, and people think of the actor before the character, etc, why would the actor have no claim?

it helps to understand that US law exists for the purpose of completing a TON of genocides. you can’t really go around making moral arguments- politically you can, but the upshot is going to be a wrecking ball not a paper

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