Japanese court rules human voices are protected in landmark AI case

A Tokyo court has sided with a Japanese voice actor who claimed a TikTok account had used AI to clone his "lustrous" baritone delivery, ruling that the human voice is protected by law in a landmark case. Kenjiro Tsuda is a prominent anime voice actor who has starred in huge number of movies, series and video games across his more than 30-year career, with his turn as Seto Kaiba in Yu-Gi-Oh! Tsuda asserted that the voice of the narrator of several TikTok videos uploaded to an anonymous account between July 2024 and the second half of last year was cloned from his own voice. While he was partially victorious in the case, his request to order TikTok to remove the videos in question was dismissed, as the offending account has already been deleted. In its decision, the court said that using the voice of an actor without permission should be deemed an infringement on their publicity rights, as reported by AFP.