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Comment by onethought | Hacker News Reader

It's an interesting question, copyright doesn't cover tone/pitch/etc... so how do you protect that? Should you even be allowed to?

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Bette Midler won her lawsuit against Ford Motor Co: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

So that only worked because Bette Midler was very well known AND the main reason for using the impersonation was to get that recognition.

So you could still deep fake voice actors with the intention of just saving money rather than wanting people to recognise them.

It may be a grey zone now but I find it likely that judges will decide that copyright does cover the sound of someone's voice and other aspects (intonation, accent), as these are vital aspect of the performance and often the reason why a voice actor gets hired.

I'd go much farther than that. Unique features of someone's voice and appearance (face, walk) should not only be protected by copyright but also by privacy laws. It would be crazy if producers were allowed to make arbitrary videos with anyone's appearance and voice, putting words in your mouth you'd never endorse.

Luckily, this may be one of the cases when politics will react fast and swiftly, if necessary with new laws, since politicians would likely be among the first victims of the new trend.

As someone that wants to abolish patents and limit copyright, I'd say no. Others without those leanings will no doubt disagree.

So if you limit copyright, how do you intend to monetise original expression? Or you don’t agree such things should be monetised

They are free to make money during the term of the copyright, but that term should be reduced by a lot. And I don't think the definition of copyright should be extended to include someone's voice, style, appearance, recipes, or others that I'm leaving out.

Is it an extension? (I know technically it is). Voice could be captured as accent/pitch/tone... I guess it’s a problem as there would be too much natural overlap, so not really a novel expression.

Maybe voice would be better suited to trademark protection? After all, it isn't really about accent/pitch/tone, but about being sure that if something sounds like it's voiced by $VoiceActor, it's actually voiced by $VoiceActor (and $VoiceActor gets their cut of royalties/recognition).

There's probably a trademark / misrepresentation / self image rights angle that could be argued, same as with say faces. That wouldn't seem unfair to me. It should require a lot more than just pitch similarity imo.

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