Her voice is not really unique in anyway nor are her looks. While she may not use this as a cudgel against anyone who looks like or sounds like her other artists will.
While I am not opposed to protections for all people, I am opposed to just the wealthy getting this privilege through trademark.
We’ve already seen dead actors being brought back through AI usage, I think Val Kilmer was one of them. She might not have the most unique looks but even I can recognize her; someone stealing her likeness to make sales is very possible and would have huge repercussions, especially with how culty her base can be.
Ultimately it should be thoroughly illegal if someone hasn’t opted into it and the legal battle should be telling the people who used the likeness should be told to go fuck themselves.
There is a lot going on here to be honest and you brought some additional complexity into it by bringing up a dead person.
First, she doesn’t need trademark to sue companies for using unauthorized statements or pictures/video of her even if it is AI generated. This is called the right of publicity.
California has a law on the books that addresses your concerns around death and it is a better solution than trying to shoehorn trademark into this problem. I don’t necessarily agree with posthumous protection myself, but it is a better way to accomplish a goal.
Fuck all of these artists keeping ticketmaster alive.
Fuck all billionaires. Fuck Taylor. Fuck AI.
ABAB includes Taylor Swift.
Yeah this is one of those ones like:
She’s not wrong, but also, she can get bent.
It does however set a precedent for other celebrities and people going forward so I’m kinda with her on this one. If there’s one person who can make a stink about this and have it matter, it’s probably her.
It would have been better if it was one of the likeable celebrities. Like Keanu Reeves.
But I guess you take what you can get.
It does however set a precedent for other celebrities and people going forward
The precedent is “you need to jump through a series of legal hoops and build up a legal army in order to secure what was already supposed to be yours to begin with”.
It would have been better if it was one of the likeable celebrities. Like Keanu Reeves.
It wouldn’t matter, because we’re talking about an entrenched legal precedent not a likeability contest.
In some sense, it begins to feel like all that sovereign citizenship bullshit. People being fed this narrative that you have to perform an elaborate, esoteric legal dance in order to have your humanity recognized by the state bureaucracy. It creates the (false) impression that there’s One Neat Trick to having your civil rights acknowledged and respected, and you just need to be savvy enough to speak the magic words and perform the ritual dance. In truth, you’re in a boxing match with a gorilla.
Who did she exploit to earn her billions?
You tell me. But I know it’s impossible to become a billionaire without exploiting someone, not paying taxes, and not being greedy as fuck.
Change my mind.
impossible to become a billionaire without exploiting someone, not paying taxes, and not being greedy as fuck.
You’re stating your opinion as fact.
There are billionaire artists simply because people want to buy what they’re selling. Equating Taylor Swift or James Cameron to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos is absolute cringe behaviour, devoid of all nuance.
How are the bodies of all of the people that build her stages doing? How about all of her dancers and backup singers? “But she gave a huge bonus to everyone on her last tour!!” Okay, and what about the dozens of tours before that?
Nobody becomes a billionaire without exploiting someone.
Cool. No one should do any work by that metric.
You fucking zealots are even more annoying than Swifties.
If jesus made 1500 dollars every day since he was born without paying taxes and spending any money, he would now be a billionaire. But sure, she cracked the code of becoming an ethical billionaire in a few years.
Zucc’s networth is 100x of Swift’s.
You fucking zealots are even more annoying than Swifties.
Those billions came from underpaid workers that supported the billionaire in their endeavors. Think road crew and tour bus drivers and beverage stand workers.
Someone somewhere was getting screwed in order for her to make billions.
Great. No one should do any work then.
You fucking zealots are even more annoying than Swifties.
If I were you I wouldn’t post when I was so upset over trivial matters. It’s not good for your mental health. Maybe take a break from the internet for a bit. You seem to need it.
There are billionaire artists simply because people want to buy what they’re selling.
You’re stating your opinion as fact.
You should go and do some math to understand what it actually takes to become a billionaire and what an insane amount of money that is. Then you can try and explain to me how an honest person can achieve that in a lifetime.
Maybe you should do some math before equating Taylor Swift to Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe you can’t. So let me make it easy for you. Zucc’s networth is 100x that of Swift.
You fucking zealots are even more annoying than Swifties.
her fans, for one.
Then I’m being exploited by the farmers. 🙄
by paying them the same money twice?
Pretending her fans choosing to buy her merch multiple times is same as billionaires fucking over their employees is a dishonest stance. Don’t pretend otherwise.
a bunch of people buying the same piece of merch multiple times because of a dishonest marketing ploy? yeah i consider that exploitive.
Their money, their choice.
You fucking zealots are even more annoying than Swifties.
Between an exploitative streaming economy and a “cost-of-touring crisis,” buying merch is sometimes the most direct way to get money into an artist’s pocket, even with venue cuts. Just ask Taylor Swift, who, according to Pollstar, made approximately $200 million in merchandise from her 2023 Eras tour dates.
The Environmental Impact of Fast Fashion, Explained
Fast fashion companies focus on low-cost garments that replicate the latest fashion trends, quickly pushing them into stores to capitalize on these trends. This means that retailers are able to offer a greater variety of products in large quantities and allow consumers to get more fashion and product differentiation at a low price.
According to an analysis by Business Insider, fashion production comprises 10% of total global carbon emissions, as much as the emissions generated by the European Union. The industry dries up water resources and pollutes rivers and streams, while 85% of all textiles go to dumps each year. Even washing clothes releases 500,000 tons of microfibers into the ocean each year, the equivalent of 50 billion plastic bottles.
Band T-shirts are sometimes — or even often — the highest quality T-shirts available. Many bands bother to make sure that the stuff they sell is 100% cotton, fair trade, etc. I think I even have some that were made by union labor.
Band T-shirts are sometimes — or even often — the highest quality T-shirts available.
Small local bands tend to source from local manufacturers and distributors. And as they consider their merch a form of advertising, it pays to invest in material that lasts.
But the bigger and more volume-based franchises tend to get their clothes from the same global production and distribution chains as every other Fast Fashion brand. Taylor Swift isn’t contracting with a dozen different local print shops per venue to fill an order big enough to saturate a stadium. She’s going to the same folks that sell to H&M and Zara.
Won’t someone think of the poor swifties,
If someone used my face and voice to make money without so much as asking me I’d be pissed off too.
In 2023, Scarlett Johansson’s attorney demanded that an AI app stop using her likeness in an advertisement. The actor also called out OpenAI in 2024 for using an “eerily similar” voice to hers for their GPT-4o chatbot despite having declined the company’s request to provide her voice. OpenAI subsequently announced it would no longer be using the voice, but did not indicate why.
In 2024, Tom Hanks called out the “multiple ads over the internet falsely using my name, likeness, and voice promoting miracle cures and wonder drugs.”
Look at this shit. This is illegal as fuck. Imagine being a doctor and some RFK-type podcaster uses your name, face and voice to promote some hack cure and destroys your reputation.
And they ASKED Johansson and she said no and they still did it. Fuckin AI motherfuckers. No shame
That doctor thing has already happened. I saw a recent one thats basically exactly what youre describing but i cant recall his name to find it again
Rape culture type shit
Implying Sam Altman has shame is a hilarious concept.
The amount of money these companies have is disproportionate to the amount of punishment they receive when they break a law. People look at the victim and think why should she get billions (which would be a truly proportional punishment) just for them using a voice that sounds like hers. Okay fine. Then give her a commensurate amount and put the rest into a legal defense fund to help others who were harmed. But either way, the company should be proportionately punished to deter them or others from doing same again.
I don’t blame her, they are going to be forced to do this to protect themselves from the AI maniacs, who think they have the right to AI everything, whether you like it or not.
The YouTube music world is being ferociously attacked from all angles by AI. One YouTuber has a unique voice and style, and had posted numerous videos. An AI company used her voice to train their AI voice, copyrighted it, and now they are sueing HER for infringement, and YouTube has taken down all her videos. They literally stole her voice.
AI is a bad enough threat, but the people managing this technology are about the most psychopathic people who have ever been in business.
I think the problem is at the other end: the ads.
And platforms.
Some AI ad of Tom Hanks peddling a supplement, or a sexy ad of AI Taylor Swift, shouldn’t be distributed en masse in the first place, just because an algorithm or ad engine picked it up as engagement bait. It’s insane! There is nothing normal about it, and its about time we stop pretending the screwed up platforms profiting off this stuff are “free speech” and acceptable.
…Because scammers are always gonna scam. But they can only do this because the platforms are pourinf fuel on the fire.
Correct me if im wrong, but this may be a good idea. Between this and the OpenAI v ScarJo lawsuit a few years back, if Swift suceedes in trademarking herself, it may make it easier for others to do so as well.
I see the fallout being a ton of artists and celebrities following suit, eventually the barrier of legal paperwork/fees getting low enough that Youtube personalities and small time artists can also trademark themselves.
If enough people also went out of their way to legally protect their image, AI companies would be walking into a litigation minefield as they cant reasonably know how many people filed with the trademark offices. The easiest solution is to not let deepfake voices or images be too real, if they are they risk getting sued by some random actor.
It stinks that inorder to potentially set precisent to make AI less toxic, a billionair has to go to bat first, but I dont think im going to add this to my list of valid complaints about her.
Can’t wait for corporations to find a way abuse the hell out of this.
It’s a GOOD THING AI companies RESPECT Trademarks and Copyrights!
I feel like your likeness should be protected by default, is it not?
To be clear, not under copy protection but is there some other protection from impersonation such as fraud?
AFAIK Denmark is the only country with this kind of legislation on the table.
Fun fact: there’s no general concept of image/likeness rights in the UK, and photographers own the full copyright of any photos they take.
There are other laws that come into play if you were in a private place or if your likeness is used to falsely imply endorsement, but otherwise if someone takes your photo in public they can do whatever they want with it.
(Obvious disclaimer that I’m not a lawyer but the above is my understanding of the law.)
Denmark has created a new law for exactly this reason. You are entitled to your own likeness. I’m unaware of other countries, but I remember reading about the Denmark one
In the US there is a “right of publicity” that is based on state law, typically for commercial uses. There are also some laws depending on locality criminalizing deepfakes for revenge porn. Some countries use copyright law to the same end.
The “doppelganger problem” is really why this is not an easy issue to answer. If someone gets exclusive rights to a specific face, who is to say another person naturally having a similar face isn’t being wronged? How close is too close? What about similar names? And should that really be protected after death (which copyright and trademark and some publicity laws allow)?
The “doppelganger problem” is really why this is not an easy issue to answer. If someone gets exclusive rights to a specific face, who is to say another person naturally having a similar face isn’t being wronged? How close is too close?
At what point is Natalie Portman allowed to sue Keira Knightley?
Its gonna have to be case specific. -which as you said, is why it’s not so easy to make law.
If a Taylor Swift doppelganger started claiming to be Taylor Swift and making a scene, then sure the real one should be able to shut that down.
If the doppelganger started her own music career with her own name and music, then Taylor Swift can’t do shit.
If the doppelganger is somehow artificially created (computer generated or elaborate makeup/costume) than it does not have the same rights, and can be shutdown (unless its falls into the parody category, but even then it should be obviously not real).
You can be as close as you want, as long as you don’t exploit it or cause confusion. For example, Apple Computer and Apple Records coexisted for decades because they operated in separate industries. It only became a problem when Apple Computer started Apple Music.
Do we need a spoiler alert for who won that battle?
It was Apple.
Yes, but my understanding is that the bar to clear for a successful suit is a lot lower for trademark violation vs ‘unauthorized use of likeness’ or similar.
It is, but filling for registration gets you a little extra protection. Mostly just for a stronger lawsuit.
Apparently the USPTO has a whole page about it now; https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/name-image-and-likeness
What happens when a new singer shows up that has a similar voice? Or what about tribute bands or cover bands?
Let the billionaires fight eachother. And be all asshurt over it. People should start making AI Slop Taylor Swift songs and watch the Streisand effect follow.
They’re doing worst than slop songs. From images I’ve seen, she’s DEEP into Kansas City Chief fans. 😂 🤣 😂
Her reaction makes sense. Best I can hope for is some trickle down civil rights.
Using copyright to prevent pirating, what a novel idea! I am shaking in my boots! No pirating for me!!
More in line of protecting against synthetic copy cats than piracy but k
Did someone say Cats?
release the butthole cut!
OMG I didn’t even know this was a thing, lol.
Edit:
I haven’t laughed this hard in awhile. Thanks everyone.
The headline and article have zero relation with Swift’s actions. It’s pure speculation. I’m surprised she hasn’t done that yet.
What are you talking about? It says in the first paragraph that she filed the trademark applications.
I meant the reason why she filed now.
Too late I already patented it.
/j
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