Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No. Contrary to layperson belief, there is little new in deepfakes. People have been faking the image of celebs for many years decades (SNL) and faking their personality even further (Hustler v Falwell, Lohan v GTA). The porn industry has an entire genre dedicated to parodies of famous people and famous situations. And there are the professional celeb lookalikes. Every historical film involves someone trying to mimic a real person. Imagine if Winston Churchill's estate started going after every actor who has ever used "his" accent without permission. All of those are situations where the mimicry was done blatantly and openly. This is a case where the mimicry is contested at best. The only hope would be to somehow prove literal copying, her voice fed into that software.

And pity every other upcoming actor who looks/sounds vaguely similar to an existing famous person. Shall they be gagged, the very sound of their voice owned by someone else?

Is literal copying a necessary element for a right of publicity claim? I don't think so, but I don't litigate them. I would think that OpenAI's conduct in referencing ScarJo and her body of work in relation to the voice would allow for a reasonable inference that they intended the public to believe it was ScarJo's voice, and not that of a similarly sounding voice actor?

from the article: "It doesn’t matter whether a person’s actual voice is used in an imitation or not, Rothman says, only whether that audio confuses listeners"

Do you have non-layman knowledge about these kinds of claims?

That's fair use. Fair use is limited to commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, and scholarship.

OpenAI will try and claim fair use, but I don't think they'll succeed.

Fair use only applies to copyrighted material. A voice, a mode of speech, is not copyrightable. Step one in a copyright defense it to prove that no "taking" occurred, or that any involved material wasn't protected by copyright (Lohan v. GTA). Only then do you get to affirmative defenses such as fair use (Hustler). This case would not get that far, not absent evidence of literal copies of her recorded voice being played back by the software.

Parody is considered fair use because the public knows that it isn't the celebrity.

This isn't the case here.

If you want analogies it's like creating a Ferrari body, putting it around a cheap car and trying to sell it.

> If you want analogies it's like creating a Ferrari body, putting it around a cheap car and trying to sell it.

A proud tradition?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_300

Eh, what? No, not at all. That was, if anything, the other way around.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com