Capitalism: steal first, apologize with no real repurcussions later
Sadly, it was Grace Hopper who said “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.”
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper (9 December 1906 – 1 January 1992) was a U.S. Naval officer, and an early computer programmer. She was the developer of the first compiler for a computer programming language; at the end of her service she was the oldest serving officer in the United States Navy.
That brings me to the most important piece of advice that I can give to all of you: if you’ve got a good idea, and it’s a contribution, I want you to go ahead and DO IT. It is much easier to apologize than it is to get permission.
- The future: Hardware, Software, and People in Carver, 1983
Except she probably wasn’t referring to identity theft; just how to handle dumb shits in management.
Yeah, there’s some key qualifiers in there
if you’ve got a good idea, and it’s a contribution
Identity theft is neither a good idea or a contribution to society
trump x biden fan fiction being voiced with deepfaked voices is both a good idea, and beneficial to society.
Dumb shits in military management. And she was an admiral; near the top of that management.
Well, she did tell that she didn’t get a budget, so they just effectively stole from other departments. Want a table that’s not bolted down? Take it.
But that’s Navy internals, (arguably) not a massive for-profit company that’s going it out of sheer greed.
Oh so I guess piracy is fine if it’s citizens getting robbed huh? Funny how that works.
I think you misspelled capitalism.
Sony will pirate from anyone who isn’t Sony. Same with Time-Warner. Same with Columbia. Same with every studio, every label, every publishing house.
Absolutely no-one in the industry takes piracy seriously until it’s their own stuff being pirated by someone else.
Moreover, they all are used to Hollywood accounting, in which lawyers try to justify not paying someone for work whenever they can.
Hollywood. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany.
A fantastic example is the Verve’s Bitter Sweet Symphony.
It samples a few seconds of a Rolling Stones song. For this, the former Stones manager Allen Klein sues them. The Verve gives up all royalties for the whole song. So the Stones are getting that money, right? No, Klein had the ownership of the piece in question go to himself.
Klein dies in 2009, and the rights to everything finally revert to the Stones in 2019. They think the whole sampling thing with the Verve is stupid, and relinquish the song’s rights back to them.
For about 20 years, it was not only morally OK to pirate that song, but morally obligatory. The execs of the industry don’t give a shit about the artists.
We are going to need much stronger image rights for individuals in the AI age.
There’s no way to stop the technology itself (although current development may plateau at some point), so there must be strong legal restrictions on abusing it.
Yeah, the genie is out of the bottle on this one. I can do voice cloning with consumer hardware and available models. That can’t be undone, but good legal protections would be nice.
That said, the Johanson case is a bad example because it really didn’t sound much like her at all. It was a chipper yound white lady sound, but to my ear sounded nothing like Johanson. It did sound kinda like a character she voiced, but I would not gave confused the two. They cloned the voice of someone they paid to give a similar inflection as the voice from Her. That’s far removed from cloning Johanson herself. It is closer to people making music “in the style of”.
Do you want the rich to be richer? Because that’s how you make the rich richer. People like Scarlett Johanson will be able to license their likeness for millions or billions. Of course, we would have the same rights; the same rights to own a mansion and a yacht. Feeling lucky?
That’s the kind of capitalism that Marx rages against: Laws that let people demand money without contributing labor.
You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right? These are people working in a highly competitive labor market that has one of the few influential unions in the US outside of trades. Most of these AI companies aren’t going after Johansson and the like if they have to pay instead of steal. They’re going for those who are less established and trying to get a break, making them easier to exploit.
You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right?
Yes, that’s the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.
I am not sure why this is so difficult to understand. Maybe there is some confusion about the technology. You only need a few seconds of audio to clone a voice. You don’t need hours of audio from a professional. That’s why the tech can be used for scams. Likeness rights won’t create jobs for voice actors. Only free money for famous people. You can also generate random voices.
Leading AI voice companies like Elevenlabs require you to have permission to clone a voice. But how can they check if their customers are being truthful? In practice, it simply means that famous people, whose voices are known, may not be imitated. Likeness rights, by their nature, can only be enforced, with any kind of effectiveness, for the rich and famous.
OpenAI tried to hire Johansson. When she declined, they hired a different, less famous actress. Maybe they did that to defend against lawsuits, or maybe it gives better results. If they had engineered a nonexistent voice, it would be almost impossible to make the case that they did not imitate Johansson. But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.
one of the few influential unions in the US
You mean Ronald Reagan’s old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?
Yes, that’s the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.
Knowing people who are not famous but are SAG-AFTRA actors, I’m going to have to disagree very much on that. A regular contractual battle is the “in perpetuity” clause for one’s likeness. This happens at all levels. Essentially, clients often try to sneak a clause in that grants them the exclusive right to use the actor’s likeness forever. While this does not mean that the actor does not receive pay, it binds them to the client in a way that prevents them from getting other work and diminishes their bargaining ability.
But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.
If the actress was performing in an affectation to impersonate Johansson, she was effectively acting no better than a scab and enabling corpos to violate consent. Knowingly impersonating another loving actor for purposes other than parody is a scummy thing to do and the actress was ethically bound to refuse the job.
Being famous doesn’t make someone less of a person. They’re just people like the rest of us (though generally more financially lucky). We all have a right to our identity and likeness and to decide how our likeness is used. Legitimatizing the violation of that consent is not a path that benefits any worker.
You mean Ronald Reagan’s old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?
That’s a poor and fallacious argument there. California is Ronnie “Pull Up the Ladder” Reagan’s home state does that make all Californians Reaganites by association?
Knowing people who are not famous but are SAG-AFTRA actors, I’m going to have to disagree very much on that.
How do likeness rights benefit non-famous people?
Turning likeness into an intellectual property implies the right to sell it. Apparently you want to argue for likeness, so I don’t see why you would use such clauses as an argument.
That’s a poor and fallacious argument there.
It’s not an argument, as you have recognized. I hoped it would make you think.
You know that not everyone in Hollywood is part of SAG-AFTRA, right? Have you ever wondered what happened to them during the strike? I guess they just have to fend for themselves. If the “union” doesn’t care about those guys, do you think the leadership cares about the small members?
Actors are a conservative lot. At the bottom, you have the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” and at the top… Well, you know. It’s not common on lemmy to cheer for such a system.
Legal plagiarism machine
They stole it? Did they send a robot to surgically remove his vocal cords?
No, instead they raped his rights with some ToS…
Ok this
isseems like a problem of trademark not copyright, or impersonation and fraud by pretending to be him. It’s about his name, not really about his voice. His voice is also pretty generic EDIT: it’s only in this specific market segment that it’s problematic.Not sure if the video said it was from him or not. It’s been taken down, so I can’t check, but I don’t think it ever made that claim. Someone just noticed it sounded the same as Jeff.
It’s copyright because they had to have fed the model with voice data from Jeff’s videos.
Well in this case they used his likeness and brand to appear more legitimate and make money. So I’d argue this is trademark (even if not registered) so a legitimate complaint.
I don’t believe in “copyright” for a voice. See for example impersonators. But in this case it’s a deliberate deception which is pretty simple.
I don’t believe in intellectual property at all and think it is a form of theft, to deprive others from common knowledge or information just to seek rent. In case of patents I equate it even to aiding in genocide, since most advances in more energy efficiency use are patented and exploited for profit and slowing down adaptation. Without exhaustive attempts to try other systems to pay creators, copyright law is a moral abomination. That is a philosophical or ethical argument, not a legal one.
Sorry but you can’t own a voice. You can sue if it is implied that a voice is you, but you can’t own the voice. If you could, you’d run into all kinds of problems. Imagine getting sued because your natural voice sounds too much like someone with more money and lawyers than you. Of if you happened to look like a celebrity/politician.
“You can’t own your own voice”
Talking out of your dystopian ass, aren’t you?
Ok, so how would that work? What does happen if you happen to sound like someone else? Who gets the rights to that voice?
In this case, it is likely that they wanted to use his voice if the videos done in collaboration went particularly well. So the fact that it’s hus voice has a specific reason to be. This could hold as a claim, I think.
That might be a valid claim. But I would find it to be a very weak one unless they can come up with evidence that their use actually pretended to be him. The strongest argument here in my opinion would be that they hoped people would assume it’s him, even though they never state it. In the end it would be a very fact-reliant case, and subjectively I wouldn’t be convinced of an attempt to mislead based just on the use of a voice alone.
So you’d be ok with someone taking your fedia.io account and just posting whatever they wanted? I mean it’s just an account it’s not you is it?
Again, I’m asking what, in a perfect world where this kind of protection existed, would happen if two people had similar (or identical) sounding voices? Which entity would gain the legal rights and protections?
Impersonating exists, the difference there is if someone was impersonates you and says something defamatory, you can sue that person, what this article is suggesting is if I made an AI model of your voice I am not liable for anything I make that voice say
I never argued that you can’t sue for implied endorsement or defamation. That is illegal. What isn’t legal is owning a voice outright. You’re conflating the two.
There is no impersonation so good that it is totally indistinguishable from the person being impersonated when seriously analyzed.
My voice developed through a combination of my body structure, my upbringing, speech therapy and a lot of training to do VO work. I absolutely own it. I have worked very hard on it.
I own my voice the same way I own my legs.
I’m sorry but that isn’t true. A voice is a natural trait. There are other people with similar or identical voices out there.
Let’s just say you can “own” a voice. In that world, what happens when two people naturally sound similar? Who gets the rights?
Similar voices are not the same voice. You can analyze them and show that they are different.
So the answer is that the person who said it gets the rights. Because it’s their voice.
The idea that you don’t own something that is a unique part of you is ludicrous.
There is no way to exactly fingerprint a voice. There isn’t a mathematical definition of a voice. Even fingerprints and DNA aren’t completely unique; think of twins. This means that a subjective judgement would have to be made when deciding ownership.
Look, I’m obviously not going to convince you. But I hope, for your sake, that this legal framework doesn’t come to exist because you will not be the winner. Disney, Warner Brothers, or some other entity with deep pockets will own just about everything because they have the lawyers and money to litigate it.
There are real problems and dangers of trying to turn everything that has value into capital for capital owners.
You’re right. It’s not like there’s anything out there like voiceprint identification or anyth-
https://www.phonexia.com/knowledge-base/voice-biometrics-essential-guide/
Oh.
There isn’t a mathematical definition of a voice.
The subtle and human imperceptible difference between two similar yet distinct sounds (voices) is absolutely demonstrable through mathematical analysis, more specifically, signal analysis.
Sure, but you can use someone’s likeness to fraudulently tie them to some product you’re pushing. The burden here is if the average person familiar with the voice would mistake it for support, and if the creator likely intended for that to happen, and I think that standard has been met here given the response by the CEO and the allegations by Jeff Geerling’s audience.
If you just happen to look or sound like a celebrity/politician, that’s a different story because fraud requires intent. Now, if you used your likeness to imply support by that celebrity/politician for some cause or product, and you don’t disclose that you’re not them, then we’re back in fraud territory.
In this case, there seems to be clear evidence that there was intent to mislead viewers to improve views. That’s fraud.
Yes, that was the distinction I was trying to make. These cases are fact dependent. I’m willing to admit that in this specific case there might have been both the intent to imply endorsement by a specific person and that practical result.
But as you can see in the other comments where I’m getting reamed, owning a voice outright is a pretty popular (if currently legally dubious/impossible) concept.
Yeah, you technically don’t own your voice/likeness, but it’s quite difficult to use someone’s voice/likeness without violating some other law. If you call out that you’re using it and that your use is not endorsed by the person it came from, you should be fine.
I cannot wait until all actors and writers get replaced so every thing is just bland cookie cutting trite that is mid tier at best. Producers will make do much money and audience won’t have a choice but to watch it
So much money
audience won’t have a choice but to watch it
This is only true if humans stop making art. Maybe Hollywood dies at the hands of AI, but independent media will always exist & consumers will always have a choice.
But what about live performers? Why would someone go to see a local band when they can see a hologram of the ‘beetles’ for much cheaper?
I’m not sure how you can get much cheaper than a local band lol.
I can go see a DIY show with a local no-name act for less than $12. There are even shows (often I see this for theatrical shows) that are pay-what-you-can (including $0). I don’t see a world where these are going away, even in the face of AI.
Besides, I don’t think the consumer is comparing a local band with the ‘beetles’. The Beatles are quite literally one of the most influential acts of all time – it’s a false equivalency.
The voice isn’t his to own in the first place. “They” have a right to use it as much as he does.
Huh?
The voice isn’t his to own in the first place. “They” have a right to use it as much as he does.
No, it’s fraud. The CEO of the other company admitted that they consider this to be infringement, and it was done to make the video more popular, which to me means the staff did it so people would assume Jeff Geerling supported the video (and there’s evidence that viewers did initially make that assumption).
So it seems clear to me that Jeff Geerling, Jeff’s viewers, and the CEO of the company producing the videos with the voice imitation consider it to be infringement, and I believe it amounts to fraud.
How dem boots taste?
