Altman's outreach, his tweet, and the thousands of tweets and comments talking about how similar Sky is to ScarJo is enough to win the case in California.
They asked SJ, she said no. So they went to a voice actor and used her. Case closed, they didn't use SJ's voice without her permission. That doesn't violate any law to any reasonable person.
This is why all Hollywood contracts have actors signing over their likeness in perpetuity now; which was one of the major sticking points of the recent strikes.
All you know is that somebody being sued for multi-millions of dollars (and who's trustworthiness is pretty much shot) is claiming what they did. And frankly given the frequency and ease of voice cloning, there are very few people who can say with confidence that they know 100% that nobody at the company did anything to that effect.
What employee, if any, could say with 100% confidence that this model was trained with 100% samples from the voice actress they alledge and 0% from samples from Scarlett Johansson/her? And if that employee had done so, would they rat out their employer and lose their job over it?
My guess is they would have went with that voice actor either way. They had four different female voices available (in addition to multiple male voices) - 2 for the api, and I believe 2 for ChatGPT (different api voices are still available, different ChatGPT ones aren’t). If Johanssen had said yes, it’s likely they would have added a fifth voice, not gotten rid of Sky.
Assumes facts not in evidence
If there's one constant that can be relied upon, it's that "things that are reasonable to a lawyer" and "things that are reasonable to a normal human being" are essentially disjoint sets.
There's no doubt a very small (but finite) probability that the voice sounds like a grey alien from Zeta Reticuli.
That doesn't mean the alien is gonna win in court.
Perhaps merely having person A sound like person B isn't enough, but combined with the movie and AI theme it will be enough. Anyway I hope he loses.
Anybody on this forum who says that it's entirely impossible or that it's conclusive that they didn't use her voice samples simply isn't being logical about the evidence.
TBH I really like the voice and the product, but I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the number of people who seem rather tribal about all this.
They were desperate for a non-union-only actor in their casting. But repeatedly kept hitting up a union actor.
What fears for the actress' safety have been portrayed such that not only does she needs to stay anonymous, but her agent does too?
"Altman was not involved"... yet he personally reached out to SJ to try to close the deal?
Midler v Ford is already precedent that using a different actor isn't inherently safe legally.
Yes, but here it’s not being invoked in the sense of “would a reasonable person believe based on this evidence that the facts which would violate the actual law exist” but “would a ‘reasonable’ person believe the law is what the law, indisputably, actually is”.
It’s being invoked to question the reality of the law itself, based on its subjective undesirability to the speaker.
Yet it never becomes anywhere near the significant fulcrum you made it out to be here, filtering between the laws you think are good and the laws you think are bad. Further, you seem to mistake attorneys with legislators. I'd be surprised if a reasonable person thinks it is okay to profit off the likeness of others without their permission. But I guess you don't think that's reasonable. What a valuable conversation we're having.
You can, as they say, look it up.
You seem incredibly confused. Legislators pass legislation, not lawyers. So it was never a question as to what lawyers thought reasonable laws are. State representatives determined that it was a good idea to have right of publicity laws and that is why they exist in many large states in the US.
> The "reasonable man" standard is all over case law
Yes, as I already pointed out to you, and another poster did as well, this "reasonable man" standard has nothing to do with your prior use of the word reasonable as an attempt to filter out which laws are the ones you think are okay to enforce.
>You can, as they say, look it up.
You should take your own advice!
I'm not "confused" about anything.
Yes, legislators pass laws, but how those laws are actually applied very much depends on the persuasive skills of lawyers.
If your hypothetical where you could use the printed law as passed by legislators essentially as a lookup table, lawyers would serve no purpose.
But somehow people spend tons of money on them nonetheless.
In litigation, any question whether X was "reasonable" is typically determined by a jury, not a judge [0].
[0] That is, unless the trial judge decides that there's no genuine issue of fact and that reasonable people [1] could reach only one possible conclusion; when that's the case, the judge will rule on the matter "as a matter of law." But that's a dicey proposition for a trial judge, because an appeals court would reverse and remand if the appellate judges decided that reasonable people could indeed reach different conclusions [1].
[1] Yeah, I know it's turtles all the way down, or maybe it's circular, or recursive.
You are very confused. The reasonable person standard has absolutely nothing to do with your initial post where you quoted it.
>If your hypothetical where you could use the printed law as passed by legislators essentially as a lookup table, lawyers would serve no purpose.
What the fuck are you talking about? The stuff I see people here say about the law is INSANE. You don't need a lawyer in the US if you are an individual person, you can represent yourself. What the hell does any of it have to do with a lookup table? I've never seen something so deeply confused and misguided.