> Mitch Glazier, the chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, said that Johansson may have a strong case against OpenAI if she brings forth a lawsuit.
> He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use.
> But Mark Humphrey, a partner and intellectual property lawyer at Mitchell, Silberberg and Knupp, said any potential jury probably would have to assess whether Sky’s voice is identifiable as Johansson.
> Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.”
* A.K.A. "Personality rights": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
> Ford Motor created an ad campaign for the Mercury Sable that specifically was meant to inspire nostalgic sentiments through the use of famous songs from the 1970s sung by their original artists. When the original artists refused to accept, impersonators were used to sing the original songs for the commercials. Midler was asked to sing a famous song of hers for the commercial and refused. Subsequently, the company hired a voice-impersonator of Midler and carried on with using the song for the commercial, since it had been approved by the copyright-holder. [1]
If you ask an artist to sing a famous song of hers, she says no, and you get someone else to impersonate her, that gets you in hot water.
If you (perhaps because you are savvy) go to some unknown voice actress, have her record a voice for your chatbot, later go to a famous actress known for one time playing a chatbot in a movie, and are declined, you are in a much better position. The tweet is still a thorn in OA's side, of course, but that's not likely to be determinative IMO (IAAL).
Not to over-analyze your use of language, but using the possessive here makes it seem like she personally owned that phrase or its use was associated with her. First, I don't know if that's true. Did she say, "Ooh la la," constantly, or is it just something she said at the beginning of the music video (and possibly studio recording) of the one hit from Deee-Lite, Groove Is In The Heart? Moreover, that phrase is a fairly well-known and widely-used one, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ooh_La_La. It certainly was not original to her nor would its use indicate an association to her. To your point, its use plus the aesthetic of the character does seem like a reference to Lady Miss Kier's appearance in that music video (if not also her style and appearance more generally, I don't know if that is how she always looks). But she didn't sue everyone else on this list for the use of her supposed catch phrase, ooh la la.
I hate to say one person's fame is so great that they get special or different treatment in court, but I think "Lady Miss Kier" was punching above her weight in trying to sue over use of her image. Her fame was a flash-in-the-pan one-hit-wonder in the early 90s, no offense to any Deee-Lite fans. It was certainly a great song (with some help from Herbie Hancock, Bootsy Collins, and Q-Tip).