Over the past few years, the PRC courts have witnessed a significant increase in AI-related disputes (see our previous newsletters here and here). The Beijing Internet Court’s recent decision on an AI-generated voice case further enriches the jurisprudence in this dynamic field. On 23 April 2024, the Beijing Internet Court handed down its first ruling on the infringement of personality rights concerning an AI-generated voice. Notably, this ruling affirms that the protection granted to a natural person’s voice rights, as stipulated in the PRC Civil Code, extends to an AI-generated voice, provided that the public associates the AI-generated voice with the voice of that individual.

In this case, the Plaintiff was a dubbing artist who discovered that certain voice recordings she provided to a media company (Defendant 2, who owns the copyright in these recordings) were passed onto a software company (Defendant 3) who subsequently developed a text-to-voice product (the “AI Voice Generation Product”) based on those recordings. Defendant 3 sold the AI Voice Generation Product on a cloud service platform operated by a network technology company (Defendant 4) to another technology company in Beijing (Defendant 5). A further technology company (Defendant 1) contracted with Defendant 5 to use the AI Voice Generation Product on its platform.

The Plaintiff claimed the Defendants’ actions infringed her voice rights. The core issues of the case were:

1. Does an AI-generated voice infringe a Plaintiff’s voice rights?
2. Is the copyright owner of a recording entitled to further process the recording with an AI tool without the consent of the holder of the voice rights?
3. Which parties should be held liable for the violation of the voice rights?

The court held that an AI-generated voice could violate personality rights if the general public would have no difficulty associating the AI-generated voice with that of the voice actor. Hence, the Plaintiff’s voice rights, being part of the broader personality rights, are protected under the PRC Civil Code. Further, the copyright owner’s right to the recordings does not include the right to use the recordings for further digital processing or the right to create an AI product which automatically transforms a segment of text into a recording featuring the Plaintiff’s voice. Based on the foregoing, the court held that Defendant 2 and Defendant 3 should compensate the Plaintiff for her losses (which the court determined at RMB250k), while Defendant 1 and Defendant 3 should publicly apologise to the Plaintiff.

The protection of voice rights is not a novel concept. Prior to the recent developments of AI, the courts were mainly focused on protecting a person’s voice rights from unlawful impersonation and/or unauthorized misuse by another human. Lately, the US has taken more progressive steps to legislate this emerging field. At the federal level, the No AI Fraud Act (H.R.6943), introduced by House Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, expressly stipulates that any person or entity who distributes, transmits, uses the voice or likeness or materially contributed thereto without the authorization of the individual holding the voice or likeness right should be held liable for damages as set forth in the Act. Although the Act is still pending enactment, it sheds light on the direction that US law will take.

In Hong Kong there is no specific legislation addressing the issue of AI infringement of personality rights and one must rely on the common law doctrine of passing off in the case of damage to a person’s goodwill. It is however worth noting that the Hong Kong government recently launched a public consultation on AI and Copyright, which touches upon the issue of deepfakes.

The PRC court is not the first, and will not be the last, court to recognize an individual’s voice rights and safeguard them against unauthorized misappropriation or misuse by AI-powered tools. Since China does not have specific legislation addressing AI-infringement of personality rights, it will be interesting to see whether it will also introduce new legislation targeting this issue (following the US approach) or will continue to deal with it under its existing Civil Code framework.