zlacker

Wonder if there's any legal risk here. It's long been legal to imitate someone's voice as long as you don't try to make people think it really is that person's voice. This is very common in parodies.

In the case of computer-generated voices, there are qualities that are desirable that also happen to be attributes of a real person's voice. How many of these desirable attributes can a computer-generated voice have before it's considered too close to the set of attributes a particular person's voice has?

>>Mounta+(OP)
Yes, celebrities generally own the rights to use their likeness for commercial purposes or promotions.

>>verdve+V
How are voice likeness verified? Half this thread is people saying they don't sound alike, who can tell officially?

Real question.

Is there some waveform comparison that a court would accept?

>>Frustr+q4
IMHO a court would accept a waveform comparison that proved beyond all doubt that the two voices are similar, but I doubt you'd find a court that would settle the issue just because the comparison said no.

The cases brought forth by Marvin Gaye's family [1] showed that some judges will declare copyright infringement even if the melody, harmony and rhythm are different. Note that the author saying he reverse-engineered the original song in question probably had something to do with it, so in the end intent and artistic perception will always remain factors that no computer function can compute.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharrell_Williams_v._Bridgep...