I was reading an article on an audio copyright festival in Beijing (how fun!!). There was a section about AI-created audio content.
While “AI can easily imitate and copy the creative style of others without involving the imitating of specific works, which challenges essential systems and principles of the Copyright Law”, the article presents a solution. We should distinguish between the right of attribution from copyright. The right of attribution can be credited to AI and this serves a similar purpose as a trademark. On the other hand, the copyright should belong to the “natural person who is the AI developer”.
The festival discussed AI imitating the voice of others to create audio content. They suggested that the “voice of a specific natural person could be classified as personality rights for protection and commercial use” but that “original right holders still lack an effective way to protect their rights in the face of such problems.” This also led me to think about copyright issues on all those computer generated voiceovers on TikTok. I did a google search and this problem did come up: “TikTok has agreed to settle a lawsuit with Bev Standing, the voice actress who said she was behind the app’s original text-to-speech voice. Standing sued TikTok in May, saying that the app was using her voice without permission. A robotic version of what sounded like Standing’s voice had been in the app for months, speaking over what felt like every other video at the time.” I wonder what the causes of action were and how this would have played out in court.
Communications Law