Right of Publicity Law: Who Owns Your Name and Face?
Right of Publicity: Who Owns Your Name and Face?
Full episode — get the app to download it, read along word by word, and make your own.
The short answer
Right of publicity law lets individuals sue over unauthorized commercial use of their identity, but protections vary widely across 35 states with no federal statute. New AI voice-cloning cases like Lehrman v. Lovo show copyright and trademark claims failing while state publicity claims survive, making jurisdiction the deciding factor.
- California allows suits over unauthorized commercial use of name, voice, signature, photo, or likeness, plus recovery of profits.
- 35 states recognize publicity rights and 25 have statutes, each differing in scope and remedies as of 2020.
- Tennessee's ELVIS Act extends liability upstream to AI developers and distributors, not just publishers of clones.
- Lehrman v. Lovo (2025) dismissed copyright and trademark claims over AI voice imitation but let New York publicity claims proceed.
- Congress has not passed a federal right-of-publicity law, leaving a state-by-state patchwork as the operative legal reality.
Transcript
The Identity Toll Road
AtlasWelcome to YourTalks.
AtlasCalifornia law lets a person sue over unauthorized commercial use of their name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness — and collect both damages and the profits the other party made.
AtlasThat means a podcast, a meme, or an AI-generated voice clip can cross from commentary into a legal claim the moment it suggests endorsement or sells something — no contract required, no warning label, no obvious line on the floor.
NovaThe framing of 'protecting identity' sounds reasonable until you realize the same framework that shields a celebrity from an unauthorized ad also creates a toll road that ordinary creators have to navigate without a legal team.
NovaWe're going to cover two lanes: what publicity rights protect and where the speech line sits, then how AI clones are blowing the whole bargain open.
NovaSo the first question worth pinning down is what exactly gets bought and sold when a person's identity shows up in commerce — and that's where we start.
Who Owns Your Identity?
NovaThe confusing part is that talking about a person is almost always legal, but selling an association with that person without permission can be a different matter entirely.
AtlasThe right of publicity is not about whether something is true or whether it invades your private life — it is specifically about unauthorized commercial exploitation of your identity.
NovaThat distinction matters because it separates publicity from defamation, which requires falsity and reputational harm, and from privacy, which is about intrusion into personal space.
AtlasThe core question in a publicity claim is whether someone used your name, face, or voice to sell something or create a commercial association without your consent — not whether they lied about you.
NovaAnd the right is not reserved for celebrities — any person can bring a claim, though fame affects how much economic harm you can prove and therefore how much you can recover.
AtlasThat is where the system quietly advantages the already-famous: the bigger your commercial identity, the bigger the damages calculation, which means the law is structurally more useful to people who already have market power.
NovaJurisdiction shapes the outcome dramatically, and that is not a minor footnote — California and New York have detailed statutes, but the specific protections, covered identity markers, and available remedies differ between them.
AtlasNew York's framework is narrower, focused on living people and advertising or trade uses, while California's statute covers a broader set of identity markers and allows recovery of attributable profits on top of damages.
NovaAs of 2020, 35 states recognized some form of the right, and 25 had statutes — which means if you are a creator running a national campaign, you are navigating 35 different legal regimes simultaneously.
AtlasPostmortem rights add another layer: some states let the right survive death and pass to an estate, which means a deceased performer's identity can still generate licensing obligations and litigation decades later.
NovaFor ordinary people, postmortem rights are mostly theoretical — your estate is unlikely to sue anyone over your name — but for a major entertainer's estate, it is a revenue stream and a control mechanism.
AtlasThe speech boundary is where the law gets contested: news reporting, criticism, satire, documentary work, and expressive art can all depict real people without triggering liability, because the First Amendment does not evaporate the moment a real name appears.
NovaThe practical test is whether the use is primarily expressive or primarily commercial — a magazine profile is protected, a product ad using the same person's face without consent is not, and a lot of real-world content lands somewhere in between.
AtlasThat gray zone is where the leverage lives, because a cease-and-desist letter does not require a court to agree with it, and most small creators cannot afford to litigate the distinction.
The Clone Problem
AtlasGenerative AI changed the enforcement calculus because it removed the practical barrier that used to limit identity theft at scale — you no longer need the person in the room to manufacture a convincing performance.
NovaLegislators noticed, and the response has been a wave of state-level digital-replica statutes layered on top of the existing publicity framework — Tennessee, California, Illinois, New York, Montana, and Washington all moved between 2024 and 2026.
AtlasTennessee's ELVIS Act is the sharpest example because it reaches not just the person who publishes an unauthorized voice clone, but also the developers and distributors of the AI tools used to create it.
NovaThat upstream liability is a significant design choice — it means a platform or a model provider can be on the hook even if they never targeted a specific person, which creates real compliance pressure across the whole AI supply chain.
AtlasLehrman v. Lovo, decided in mid-2025, illustrated the federal gap cleanly: copyright and trademark claims over voice imitation were dismissed, but New York publicity claims survived, which tells you exactly where the actionable theory lives right now.
NovaFor a creator or a startup, that ruling means federal IP law does not protect you if someone clones your voice — your recourse depends entirely on which state you are in and whether that state has a statute that covers synthetic audio.
AtlasOn the licensing side, the economics are opaque by design — there is no published rate card because fees depend on the celebrity's fame, the campaign's territory and duration, exclusivity, medium, and whether you are dealing with a living person or an estate.
NovaThat opacity is a real burden for smaller brands and independent creators, because the only way to know what a license costs is to hire a lawyer and start negotiating, which prices out most people before the conversation begins.
AtlasPlatforms have responded with consent-record requirements and takedown procedures, but those are contractual and policy-level tools — they do not substitute for a statutory right, and they shift enforcement work onto the person whose identity was used.
NovaPending litigation, including claims that AI model parameters themselves embed biometric voiceprints, is testing whether existing statutes can reach the training stage — not just the output — and courts have not resolved that yet.
AtlasCongress has not enacted a comprehensive federal right-of-publicity law, which means the patchwork of state rules is the operative legal reality for anyone running a national AI product or advertising campaign today.
NovaThe risk of a federal fix is that it could overcorrect — a broad national right that covers every reference to a person's identity would hand enormous censorship leverage to anyone famous enough to threaten litigation.
AtlasThe harder design problem is that the same legal tool that protects a musician from having her voice cloned into a fake endorsement can also be used to suppress a documentary, a parody, or a critical AI experiment she simply dislikes.
NovaUntil there is a federal framework with clear carve-outs for satire, news, and non-commercial uses, ordinary people and small creators are absorbing the legal uncertainty that well-resourced celebrities and their estates can afford to navigate.
Sources
- Ai Policy And Regulation Resourceslaw.washu.edu
- Right Of Publicityppc.land
- Voice Training Publicity Litigationbackfield.net
- Lacbalacba.org
- 2025 Tsuda V Tiktok Ai Voice Imitation Tokyonope.net
- Old Statutes New Targets Plaintiffs Using Existing Privacy Consumer Laws Against Ai Companieszwillgen.com
- Protect Your Face Understanding The Right Of Publicity And Recent Developmentslawforbusiness.usc.edu
- Washington State Right Of Publicity Ai Replicasdwt.com
More episodes
What is YourTalks?
Type any topic and get a two-host podcast about it — researched from real sources, scripted, and voiced in minutes.