ELVIS Act Needs to Be 'Returned to Sender'
There are more than 35,000 Elvis impersonators in the US, but Republican lawmakers in Tennessee are very concerned about the potential for AI to develop more of them.
They recently introduced a bill dubbed the ELVIS Act that purportedly seeks to add voice as a protected category under right of publicity laws. These laws have governed the use of a person’s name, likeness, and image in content for commercial purposes for some time and work very well. The problem? The ELVIS Act doesn’t follow their typical model.
In fact, it’s so overly broad that instead of merely ensuring AI cannot replicate a person’s voice for commercial purposes it ensures anyone making parody, documentaries, or even news-related content could find themselves in a Tennessee courtroom.
Allow me to explain.
Right of publicity laws typically include stringent, clear exceptions and only apply to advertising, merchandise, and fundraising purposes. Those exceptions are for “newsworthy” images in content that provides a “public interest,” which encompasses everything from hard news to documentaries, to satire, to celebrity gossip.
This is a fantastic structure that ensures an individual has a right to their own personhood while also upholding the First Amendment, its protections for free expression and freedom of the press, and ensuring the public has easy, fast access to information.
The ELVIS Act doesn’t include these provisions. As currently written, filmmakers would have to obtain permission from nefarious actors like Jeffrey Epstein’s estate in order to make a documentary about him. The producers of Forrest Gump wouldn’t be able to include all those scenes with historic figures.
That’s a really good way to protect powerful people from scrutiny. And it would severely stagnate the flow of information online as even obtaining such permissions could take weeks. Additionally, out of fear, many content creators would simply play it safe out of fear of litigation.
The ELVIS Act also does not limit its reach to those living or dead, nor does it restrict its parameters to those with a Tennessee domicile. This seems like an open plea for people to infiltrate the state with ridiculous lawsuits that wouldn’t make it past the first gate elsewhere. It’s almost like the trial lawyers associations wrote this bill instead of Hollywood unions.
But to be clear, this was brought to the Republican legislature by the music industry associations and Hollywood unions - a peculiar entity for conservative lawmakers to be carrying water for to say the least. What these entities really want is an end to Fair Use practices because they’re bleeding money, and instead of making better products or creating new revenue sources, they’re simply being lazy and attempting to restrict the market.
While condemnable, that’s at least understandable. What isn’t easy to understand is why Tennessee Republicans are more concerned with courting favor in Hollywood than they with upholding the constitution and protecting the rights of their residents.
As a former singer/songwriter in Nashville, who also spent time as a Director of Music Licensing working for Entertainment One, and as a person who now owns two different content creation businesses, I know better than almost anyone else involved here the problems the use of AI potentially poses to my line of work. I make my money off of the fact people care what I have to say, so AI replicating my image or voice could literally impact me.
But protections against these threats can be enacted in a sane, constitutional, pro-capitalism way. As mentioned, they already have been on many other fronts. Republicans in Tennessee could easily expand existing right of publicity laws to include voice without all the excess baggage of the ELVIS Act.
Elvis Presley once said, ““Don’t criticize what you don’t understand, son.” To lawmakers I’d say, “Don’t regulate what you don’t understand,” and it’s very clear they don’t get it when it comes to the nuances of content creation and technology.
Hannah Cox is the President and Co-Founder of BASEDPolitics.
