Not if the damages are presumed (e.g., if the false defamatory statement published to a third party consists of a claim that the plaintiff has a venereal disease, is unfit for their profession, or is a sexual deviant). Then, damages are presumed to exist.
I interpret it completely differently given that the voice actor does not sound like SJ.
1. OpenAI wants to make a voice assistant. 2. They hire the voice actor. 3. Someone at OpenAI wonders why they would make a voice assistant that doesn’t sound like the boss’s favorite movie. 4. They reach out to SJ who tells them to pound sand.
Accordingly, there is no misappropriation because there is no use.
If anyone at Spotify is reading this, I just cancelled my account. You guys deserve considerably less money than you have now, but this is the best I can do.
You’re right that a random person’s voice is not IP, but SJ is not a random person. She’s much more like Mr. Waits or Ms. Milder than you or I.
I don’t believe the burden would be to prove that the voice actor was impersonating, but that she was misappropriating. Walking down the street sounding like Bette Midler isn’t a problem but covering her song with an approximation of her voice is.
You are dead right that the order of operations recently uncovered precludes misappropriation. But it’s an interesting situation otherwise, hypothetically, to wonder if using SJ’s voice to “cover” her performance as the AI in the movie would be misappropriation.
The insurance company-driven model for industry specific safety improvement that worked so well for fire safety and auto safety has proven impossible because of three factors:
1. Cryptocurrency allows for unimaginably huge untraceable ransom payments that Amazon gift cards did not support,
2. No liability in tort for insecure software, and
3. Lack of computer security regulation (e.g., your car must have a seatbelt and ABS but your software can be arbitrarily bad without being prohibited).
The software company would argue that the lawbreaking hacker was a supervening cause, while the consumer would argue the criminal was foreseeable. In the case of security software, the consumer might have a point. In practice such a claim is not usually successful.
Fifty state insurance commissioners could make this more or less happen overnight, except to the extent firms are using something other than cyber coverage to pay ransoms.
In my eyes, this would do almost as much to improve cybersecurity as liability in tort for insecure software.
The “dial” on a rotary phone broke the connection in rapid sequence a number of times corresponding to the number dialed. If your dial broke, you could place calls by “flashing” the “hook” the right number of times with pauses between.
No, voices can be exclusive. One good example is Bette Midler, who sued Ford in tort for misappropriation of voice and won on appeal to CA9. 849 F.2d 460.
In some jurisdictions, there is the concept of a limited purpose public figure. Libeling a CEO for his work as CEO might fall therein, while libeling him in the context of pro wrestling might not.