zlacker

>>mjcl+(OP)
Most of the reactions here are in unison, so there's little left to contribute in agreement.

I'll ask the devil's advocate / contrarian question: How big a slice of the human voice space does Scarlett lay a claim to?

The evidence would be in her favor in a civil court case. OTOH, a less famous woman's claim that any given synthesized voice sounds like hers would probably fail.

Contrast this with copyrighted fiction. That space is dimensionally much bigger. If you're not deliberately trying to copy some work, it's very unlikely that you'll get in trouble accidentally.

The closest comparison is the Marvin Gaye estate's case. Arguably, the estate laid claim to a large fraction of what is otherwise a dimensionally large space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgepor...

>>worsts+fc
My concern is that cases like this would set the precedent that synthetic voices can't be too close to the voice of a real, famous person. But where does that leave us? There's been lots of famous people since the recording age, and the number is only going to increase. It seems unlikely that you can distinguish your fake voice from every somewhat public/famous real voice in existence, especially going forward. Will this not result in a situation where the synthetic voices must either sound clearly fake and non-human to not be confused with an existing famous voice, or the companies/producers must in every case pay royalties to the owner to a famous voice that sounds similarly close, even if their intent wasn't even to copy said voice or any that are similar, to avoid them getting sued afterwards? Are we going to pay famous people for being famous?