This whole argument rests on the absurd assumption that you can "own" a voice as if it's property. Does this mean people can own the patterns of vibration in air? It's completely nonsensical.
"If a product is being sold that predominantly exploits the commercial value of an individual's identity, that product should be held to violate the right of publicity and not be protected by the First Amendment, even if there is some "expressive" content in it that might qualify as "speech" in other circumstances."
Whether or not the voice is determined to be predominant would be for courts to decide, of course, but there's clearly an argument.
1: https://law.justia.com/cases/missouri/court-of-appeals/2006/...
Describing a reasonable legal principle in terms of physics phenomena does not make it unreasonable.
This is a good thing, even though your comic is nothing but a bunch of JPGs--digital patterns--that can be copied infinitely without depriving anyone.
Voice-reproduction rights can get complicated in the AI age, and I don't claim to have the objective moral truth. But there are very good reasons to give legal protection to the creators of digital patterns, as a general principle.
However, in this situation, the right of publicity is probably more applicable.
In order for this to be a FALLACY, you have to explain how an appeal to law doesn't work here. Simply appealing to law itself isn't a fallacy.
If you argue similarly, then the whole juridical system is nonsensical, because everything is just particles and waves, and different configurations thereof - not to mention the many protected things that are acts, which are neither particles nor waves, and are completely made up.
I'd say it's desirable to regulate something like this, however nonsensical-seeming, so that we can at least somewhat protect the individuals, and the general well-being of society.
I do understand rivalry in economics, but that's not the issue here. The issue is the need to protect individuals from abuse, part of which is the one's right to their own likeness. This likeness is not free for the taking. Now, we can call this owning the likeness, or we can call it something else, but having something, that is not free for taking, sounds an awful lot like owning something.
Social/legal constructs like owning ideas or the sound of a voice exist not because they make any sort of logical sense, they exist to give privilege and power to certain groups at the expense of others.
Social constructs don't not exist just because they are social constructs. The physical world not the extent of reality. Social constructs are also real because we make them real as a part of our own human experience.
It implies identity, and control. The former being most relevant here. And yes, if you want to use someone's identity you need to at least get consent.
>Exclusive control over a scarce resource.
"Scarce" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. And in the grand scheme, everything can be "scarce". The internet isn't infinite either, only in a virtual sense (no pun intended).
Meanwhile, thoughts and data are resources, and you can own the idea behind it. Hence, "intellectual property".
> there is no feasible model that explains why one person has control or ownership of it over another.
That's where identity came in. If an inventor got run over tomorrow, there may still be iterations on the invention, but it would completely alter the course of iteration. That's ownership in a sense. Ownership that your ideas can't just be understood or replicated unless you transfer your thoughts to another medium. And like any conversion, data is lost in the exchange.
>they exist to give privilege and power to certain groups at the expense of others.
Yeah, the less off inventors. Do you know why IP is automatically granted? Because someone unaware of the legal channels would just have their own IP signed off once anyone in business gets a whiff of it.
of course, the priveledge still abuse it. But when everything becomes a free for all, the rich get richer.
It implies whatever society decides that it implies, no? For example, many societies had or have conceptions of land ownership that are dramatically different from the western model, oftentimes to the extent of not having individual land ownership at all.
> Social/legal constructs like owning ideas or the sound of a voice exist not because they make any sort of logical sense
They don't make logical sense to you. Consider that for a very long time in the US the idea of owning people made logical sense to the majority.
> they exist to give privilege and power to certain groups at the expense of others.
Do not almost all forms of ownership do this? Some people own hundreds of thousands to millions of acres of land that I have no right to access. Massive swathes of the surface of the planet that we all share. Is the ability to own land not a far greater privilege than the ability to protect your voice from being cloned without your consent?
/s
How?