Hacker News Reader

Comment by sharemywin | Hacker News Reader

always wondered if something like this could be done. Now just train it on an famous individuals wav data and you got a free celebrity endorsement.

View on HN

I think that something rather different may take place: celebrity voices will be copyrighted (or granted similar protection under law) by the individual themselves or their estate, and licensed for use.

David Attenborough, Morgan Freeman and Billy West: call your offices.

Having Mr. Freeman tell me which directions to take will definitely make road trips more fun.

This has been a (paid) thing for a long time: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/sat-nav/maps-services/shop/navi...

Recording: https://youtu.be/2ljFfL-mL70

Yup! There was a Planet Money episode about this, called Frank Sinatra's Mug. It's all about how Frank Sinatra had the laws in California changed in order to protect the likeness - including the sound - of a celebrity. Apparently it's Section 3334 of California's Civil Code.

Quoting from the episode: "Essentially what it says is that you can't take somebody's name, or their likeness, or their signature or their voice, and use it for commercial gain without permission from that person. And if you do that, you're liable."

The full episode is here - it's one of Planet Money's best. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...

How would you copyright it? Neural Nets have weights that mean nothing outside of NN. The samples could be copyrighted. Maybe you train it on a cross between an impersonator and the famous person. Wouldn't that be a derivative work? (Famous training samples, impersonator training samples, copyrightable quote)

Derivative works are usually subject to the copyrights of the works they are derived from. If you used samples you were not licenced to use, you'd potentially be violating copyright, but I think this is one of those areas where the law hasn't yet caught up to technology. As far as I know, no cases have brought this up yet.

What if they are trained on soundalikes' voices? The tricky part would be that you probably couldn't label it as the celebrity's voice.

The more I think about it even if you used originals you could licensed John Wayne's voice from Disney(or who ever owns clips of it) or something you couldn't imply there was an endorsement it would be fraud.

Are you implying that there could be a market for synthesized knock-off celebrity voices? :D

Reply on news.ycombinator.com