Voice Rights in the US: A Patchwork of State Laws and an Unfinished Federal Bill

Why the law is behind

Adam Weissman, founder of the New York entertainment and media law firm Weissman Law, put it, “The law is a little bit behind where the technology is.” Speaking as a US attorney, he said, “We do not have a uniform rule protecting these things.”

State right-of-publicity laws

Right-of-publicity laws protect a person’s name, image and likeness, and Weissman said voice is almost always included. Each state writes its own version. Some states have none, and the ones that do set their own criteria and baselines.

New York, he said, treats using someone’s name, image or likeness for commercial purposes without written consent as “a big no-no.” New York’s statute lists voice by name alongside name, portrait, picture and likeness. California’s law, Weissman said, may reach broader kinds of replication, but that is an area that “hasn’t really been litigated much yet,” so nobody knows how the statute will play out.

Dae Bogan, head of third-party partnerships at The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC), explained why those two states matter. Because they are entertainment hubs, he said, New York and California have had more of these challenges brought to court than a state like Ohio.

Bogan also recalled an older case in which Bette Midler sued over a commercial that used someone who sounded like her. That was Midler v. Ford Motor Co., decided by the Ninth Circuit in 1988. The court held that deliberately imitating a distinctive voice to sell a product can be actionable under California common law, even though the singer in the ad was not Midler.

The federal bill that has not passed

Weissman said lawmakers have been trying to pass what he called the Fakes Act, formally the NO FAKES Act, short for Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe. In theory, he said, it “would cover a lot of this stuff,” but “it’s stuck in the Senate right now, I believe.”

That remained accurate in mid-October 2026. The bill, S. 4591, cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee in June. An attempt on September 30 to pass it by unanimous consent drew an objection, and legal press described it as stalled until at least November. Check its current status before relying on it.

Copyright and trademark workarounds

With no direct statute, Weissman said, “what we’re seeing a lot is people taking advantage of the other areas of intellectual property, mainly copyright and trademark, figuring out ways to apply it to people’s voice and their likenesses.” Lawyers are experimenting to see what works, which he said “frankly is not the best way to go about doing things.”

Trademark is the newest experiment. Moderator Loredana Cacciotti, a music lawyer and founder of Future Play Music, pointed to Taylor Swift, who she said was extending her effort to register aspects of her voice beyond the US. According to trade reporting, Swift’s company, TAS Rights Management, filed three US applications in April 2026, covering two short recordings of her saying “Hey, it’s Taylor” and “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and a stage photograph. It applied in the UK, the EU and Australia in October. Trademark attorney Josh Gerben has said that registering a celebrity’s spoken voice this way has not been tested in court.

Why a voice can’t simply be registered

Cacciotti asked whether the US requires voice to be registered, as it does for copyright before a claim can be enforced. Weissman said there is no formal registration for publicity rights. Copyright is its own system: the government built a registry long ago, and registering is a matter of filing and paying a fee. Trademark owners are also expected to register their marks, though common-law rights exist.

The larger difference, he said, is that copyright is limited to one work at a time, because the work can be identified. A voice, in theory, is endless and perpetual.