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Comment by surfingdino | Hacker News Reader

If you impersonate another actor for profit claiming to be him/her you may be facing legal action. There is a difference in selling yourself as "Scarlett Johansson" vs. "A Scarlett Johansson impersonator" vs. your own name/stage name. If it's covert and deceiving, you are in trouble, if it is overt, you are fine and that's why they world has so many Elvis impersonators. Although I see a new market opening for Kate Moss impersonators https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40498668

When it comes to works of art, if you tell the buyers/viewers it's yours you are fine, but if you paint a copy of a famous painting and claim it to be the original one, you are a criminal.

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I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if this is relevant or not, but it's not really Scarlett Johansson's voice we're talking about, it's "the character in Her that Scarlett Johansson voiced". I'd be surprised if Scarlett's natural voice matches the one in Her - I assume she would have changed her pitch and/or cadence for the movie to match the director's requirements. Samantha's voice in Her has a subtle, 'not-quite-natural' sound to it, which would make sense for a computer-generated voice.

Can the movie studio that produced Her claim copyright over Samantha's voice? If they release "Her 2" without Scarlett Johansson, could the movie studio hire someone who sounds like Scarlett to play Samantha's character?

I don't think this case is as simple as people make it out to be. Even Sam Altman's tweet: "Her", seems to confirm they took inspiration from the movie Her, so is it wrong to hire a voice actor that sounds like the character in the movie? If Sam had tweeted, "Scarlett", then it would be very different.

Do you have evidence that this voice actor was billing herself as a Scarlett Johansson impersonator or anything of that sort?

Advertising by using Her and contacting Scarlett befohand are the dooming factors. Likely not actor’s fault but instead the leads of OpenAI.

You were asking about a hypothetical situation in which you may find yourself. That's what I addressed in my reply. The person whose voice was used does not pretend to be SJ afaik. It's the communications between OpenAI and SJ and Altman's tweets that created an ambiguous situation similar to someone trying to ask an attractive person out, being told it's not going to happen, but publicly winking and suggesting that there is something going on. It backfired. OpenAI and Altman are trying to get out of it, but their time of being the darlings of the media is over. There will be more scrutiny of their actions.

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