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Comment by mike_hearn

2 years ago

That's a common retort on HN but it's information free. Judges are at least theoretically and often in practice bound to follow both written law and logic, even if it yields apparently silly outcomes. The prevalence of openly political judgements in the news makes it seem like this isn't the case, but those judgements are newsworthy exactly because they are shocking and outrageous.

If voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent, and it's very unlikely that precedent would be interpreted as "whoever the judge heard of first wins".

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mike_hearn

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JumpCrisscross  2 years ago

> it's very unlikely that precedent would be interpreted as "whoever the judge heard of first wins"

No, it's whoever's voice is famous. The voice per se isn't valuable, its fame is. Personality rights are precedented [1].

> voices being similar to each other is found to be grounds for a successful tort action then it'd establish a legal precedent

It's not about similarity. It's about property. Johansson developed her voice into a valuable asset. It's valuable because it's Scarlet Johansson's voice.

Tweeting Her explicitly tied it to Johansson, even if that wasn't the case up to that point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

  • robertlagrant  2 years ago

    > It's valuable because it's Scarlet Johansson's voice.

    I think demonstrating that this is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech will be difficult.

    • tivert  2 years ago

      >> It's valuable because it's Scarlet Johansson's voice.

      > I think demonstrating that this is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech will be difficult.

      I think it's totally irrelevant if her voice "is a substantial part of the attraction of OpenAI's tech." What matters is they took something from her that was her valuable property (her likeness). It doesn't matter if what they took makes op 99% of the value or 0.00001%.

      3 replies →

  • mike_hearn  2 years ago

    Yeah, but it's not Scarlett Johansson's voice and therefore not her property. It's one that sounds similar, but is different, and thus belongs to the true voice actress.