Hacker News Reader

Comment by User23 | Hacker News Reader

Because you prompt the AI to generate Chad Britt who looks and sounds an awful lot like Brad Pitt, but not enough so to infringe on his likeness rights.

View on HN

Not a chance. Blurred Lines lost a copyright case for seeming like it could have been a Marvin Gaye song. You won't be able to use Chad Britt unless it is a satire of Brad Pitt that every judge thinks is funny.

Quite a bit of that judgement is slowly being unwound and walked back.

Doesn't mean you're wrong about likeness cases, but the Blurred Lines/Gaye ruling is far from canon at this point.

It was an absolutely terrible judgement. It only happened that way because it was a jury. The law doesn't justify it.

Songs are copyrighted. Are faces?

Yes. Well, not copyrighted, exactly, but one gets to control the commercial exploitation of ones likeness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

Wouldn't it come down to proof of intent to exploit? Surely an actor who happens to look like Brad Pitt can't be prevented from working in the film industry on that basis alone? I agree that calling themselves Britt Pad or whatever might be crossing the line!

Seems like it is one thing to hire a look-alike of Brad Pitt (or your selected star), a very different thing to hire another actor and then replace his/her face with synthetic animated images of Brad Pitt.

The first would get laughed out of court. The latter would be an obvious ripoff to anyone (perhaps excepting some soverign-citizen-level pedants).

That’s why we can have fake Matt Damon (a.k.a. Jesse Plemons)

You could train the model on a lookalike and have him sign over rights to his (the lookalike's) likeness.

An interesting test would be a taking someone who looks extremely similar to Brad Pitt, but can’t act, and buying the rights to their likeness, and pasting it over an actor.

The "Blurred Lines" judgment is a good example of "Be an excessive jackass and the system will smack you down regardless of facts."

Had they been even slightly reasonable, it never would have gone that far.

That was a copyright case though. The legal basis for lawsuits over misappropriation of artistic likeness are in privacy and right of publicity laws, and these vary a lot from one jurisdiction to the next.

If your intention is for people to confuse this person with Brad Pitt then you already have issues that will probably get to court, at least for the first few times to be decided should this be legit or no.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com