• Margot Robbie@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    The precedent in this case already exists in Midler v. Ford Motor Co., in which when Academy Award nominated actress and singer Bette Midler sued Ford after Ford hired musical impersonators to sing famous songs for their commercials.

    The court ultimately ruled in favor of Midler, because it was found that Ford gave clear instructions to the impersonating actress to sound as much like Midler as possible, and the ruling was voices, although not copyrightable, still constitutes their distinct identity and is protected against unauthorized use without permission. (Outside of satire, of course, since I doubt someone like Trump would be above suing people for making fun of him.)

    I think Scarlett Johansson has a case here, but it really hinges on whether or not OpenAI actively gave the instruction specifically to impersonate Scarlett’s voice in “Her”, or if they used her voice inside the training data at all, since there is a difference in the “Sky” voice and the voice of Scarlett Johansson.

    But then again, what do I know, I’m just here to shitpost and promote “Barbie”.

    • bolexforsoup@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 month ago

      I think Altman’s “Her” post could really bite him in the ass. He’ll have to convince the court (assuming this escalates to that point) that yes he was talking about the movie but no it never his intention to have something mimic SJ’s character…despite attempting to make functionally the very thing from the movie.

      Tough needle to thread IMO but IANAL and I don’t have another good acronym up my sleeve to drop here so have a good one!

          • Mnemnosyne@sh.itjust.works
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            1 month ago

            I think abolishing intellectual property would hurt capitalism more than it would benefit it. Already it is strongly in favor of the rich and the big corporations. Getting rid of those limitations even without abolishing capitalism first, would, I think, be more to everyone’s benefit than detriment.

            • the_artic_one@programming.dev
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              1 month ago

              Disagree, without IP laws whoever has the most money can crush all competition. An example of this is how the first pump hand soap softsoap couldn’t patent the hand pump design because it already existed so they just bought all the existing stock to prevent anyone from releasing a competing product.

              If you get rid of IP laws you’ll just further entrench the existing winners.

              Write a good book? Without copyright, Penguin random house publishes an exact copy at a higher quality and sells a million copies while you sell a handful to discerning fans.

              Build a quality product? Without trademark, proctor and gamble flood the market using your brand name and nobody can distinguish their products from yours even though their quality is much worse.

              Invent something revolutionary? Without patents you have to keep your process a secret so you don’t get copied. If you get hit by a bus your invention is now lost to society forever unless someone manages to reverse-engineee it.