And whether you think it's fair or not, intentionally trying to tie your product to a celebrity without their permission is not permitted by the courts. See the Midler case. See the Watts case.
Making fun of Darth Vader on Saturday Night Live is fair use. Using Darth Vader to sell your cars is not.
If it is distinguishable to be a different person, courts have ruled that it's fine, see https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/435...
Hm.
You had said there were no parallels in this ScarJo situation and I'm merely pointing out that there are.
You keep bringing up the Midler case in other comments, but Ford had licensed the rights for the songs from the rights owner as well. What's different here? If the Sinatra case isn't relevant to all of this because the song was licensed, I don't see how the Midler case stays relevant.
https://opencasebook.org/casebooks/3008-property-in-the-age-... > Young & Rubicam had a license from the copyright holder to use the song.
I did not say there were no parallels. I said there were multiple parallels in the Sinatra case: The usage of the song's melody, the 'boot' in the product name, lyrics tying the two together.
The only parallel we have here is Altman referring to a movie about a female-voiced AI assistant when releasing a female-voiced AI assistant. I think any reasonable person would agree there are far fewer direct parallels in the OpenAI/ScarJo kerfuffle than the Goodyear/Sinatra one.
That's a fair point - thank you for bringing it to my attention.
I disagree with your count on parallels, however. By licensing the rights to the song, the song's melody and lyrics were not at issue, leaving only the boot.
Is the boot equivalent to the fact that both characters are revolutionary, flirtatious voice-only female artificial intelligences? I don't think it's anywhere close, but I accept that you'll likely disagree.
REGARDLESS, I'm having a seriously hard time understanding how the closing statement in Midler-v-Ford isn't directly relevant to this case:
"We need not and do not go so far as to hold that every imitation of a voice to advertise merchandise is actionable. We hold only that when a distinctive voice of a professional singer is widely known and is deliberately imitated in order to sell a product, the sellers have appropriated what is not theirs and have committed a tort in California."
It seems very clear that ScarJo's voice was deliberately imitated in order to sell a product.
But the Sky voice does not sound like it was trained off of ScarJo, or even off of someone who sounded a whole lot like her. There are some similarities, but, the voice sounds as close to, say, Rashida Jones as it does ScarJo. Yes, Altman posted a dumb tweet referencing Her which obviously looks to be in very poor taste, and yes they obviously wanted ScarJo herself, but does that mean they should not be allowed to have a voice that sounds even remotely similar to her?
It is standard and accepted practice for scriptwriters or directors to have a preferred casting in mind for a role, and when that person isn't able to be cast for whatever reason, for them to pick a person that fits similar criteria. What is different here?
The voices are different enough that I do not believe anyone as close to her as she claims would confuse the two. I pulled up a episode of Jimmy Fallon where she was on and compared the voice to one of the clearest audio videos of the Sky voice from the 4o demos, and they have different pitches, frequently different cadences to speech, etc. There are some similar mannerisms - there's a reason people see the resemblance - but if you isolate the audio of the two I don't think the majority of people would listen to them and go "Yep that's gotta be the same person," especially without all this context biasing their opinions.