California fights for future to protect performers – Daily News

Who owns your face and your voice?

Generally, you do. But the question becomes much more complex now that artificial intelligence can grab you from stuff on the Internet and quickly create a digital likeness that can do all sorts of things.

Many of these things make money. Digital likenesses can appear in movies, TV shows and commercials, as well as monetized pieces on Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube, Rumble, and probably five more platforms that could have a million users by lunchtime tomorrow.

So whose money is it?

This is a fascinating question that concerns bloodsuckers. This is not a criticism, this is a 1979 California Supreme Court decision regarding Count Dracula merchandise.

In 1930, actor Bela Lugosi signed a contract with Universal Pictures to play Dracula. He was neither the first nor the last actor to play a vampire aristocrat, but the performance was so iconic that his voice and image became a valuable and marketable commodity. Decades later, when Universal licensed the monster movie characters for sale, Bela Lugosi was the face of Dracula.

Lugosi’s widow and son sued Universal for unauthorized use of the actor’s image. The state Supreme Court disputed whether the right to advertise Lugosi’s likeness was included in the original contract, whether the issue involved rights of ownership, publicity or privacy, and whether the rights died with Lugosi or passed to his non-living heirs.

The majority of the judges concluded that the right of publicity that belonged to Lugosi during his lifetime did not pass to his heirs. But California’s legislature soon stepped in with a new law that makes the right to profit from the use of a person’s likeness, with certain exceptions, a right of publicity that continues after death.

In 1999, after dance video producers used Fred Astaire videos without permission from his widow, Robin, the legislature passed another law to curtail the exemptions in the previous law.

But at the time, legislators did not think to include in the law any restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence to create a completely new performance of a deceased celebrity and post it on the YouTube channel.

That’s exactly what happened to the late George Carlin in 2024, when the hosts of the Dudesy podcast released an hour-long “comedy” special called George Carlin: I’m Glad I’m Dead.

Carlin’s family was not happy.

The Dudesy team claimed that the performance was created using generative artificial intelligence. The Carlin estate filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court. At the time, one of the podcast hosts told the New York Times that the jokes were actually written by another podcast host and not by AI Carlin.

Did they violate copyright law? Property rights? Rights of publicity? What exactly was created here, who created it and who has the right to monetize it?

The case was resolved, so there was no need to go to court. But it prompted the union that represents performers, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, known as SAG-AFTRA, to sponsor legislation in California to expand the protections the law provides to the heirs of people whose valuable performances have suddenly become unlimited AI training material.