Comment by gambiting
1 day ago
Unfortunately, the law is already quite stupid around this.
There have been many cases where a company wanted to hire say, actor X to voice their commercial, actor refused, so they hired someone else with a nearly identical voice, the original actor sued and won(!!!!!) because apparently it's their "signature" voice.
I disagree because obviously that means the other person has no right to make money using their voice now, at no fault of their own?
But yeah I'd imagine you'd have the same problem here - you can't generate a picture of say, Brad Pitt even if you say well actually this isn't Brad Pitt, it's just a person who happens to look exactly like him(which is obviously entirely possible and could happen).
Yeah, but those cases hinged on the fact that the ad company tried to hire the actor first, thus demonstrating intent of using this actor. Had they hired Nearly Identical Voice directly they probably would not have lost.
These cases generally are not about just someone that happened to sound the same, but someone who was choosen specifically and directed to sound like the imitated person. Even explicitly looking for similarity is generally fine, calls for voice actors will include references to well-known VAs as "the sort of thing we are looking for", only imitation is going to far.
(In music, some other cases have been about suspected misuse of actual recordings, e.g. a cover band being sued because the original musician believes they actually used one of their recordings, and disproving that can be tricky. I don't think that can as easily happen with look-alikes)