On 9 April 2025 US senators introduced S.1367, the Protecting the Voice and Likeness of Individuals Act, referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The core of the bill is to build a set of rights over a person’s voice and likeness that can be asserted at the federal level.
Why voice and likeness
The threshold for voice cloning technology has fallen to the point where a few seconds of audio is enough to generate a highly similar voice. In the absence of dedicated legislation, rightsholders can only rely on state-level right of publicity rules, and the scope of protection and the remedies available differ from state to state.
S.1367 tries to unify that protection at the federal level, in a direction complementary to the US COPIED Act with its focus on content provenance: one protects a person’s voice and image, the other traces the origin of content.
How it divides work with deepfake legislation
The TAKE IT DOWN Act advanced in the same period focuses on the removal of non-consensual intimate imagery, while S.1367 focuses on commercial use of voice and likeness. Together they respond to different sides of unauthorised use of a person’s image.
The distinction matters: TAKE IT DOWN deals with rapid takedown of content, S.1367 deals with ownership of rights and licensing relationships. The first is a question of enforcement speed, the second a question of where the boundary of the right lies.
The practical impact on Chinese companies
First, AI voice products going overseas need rights clearance upstream. For functions involving dubbing, audio content or virtual-human voices, the provenance of the training audio and the synthesised timbre should be confirmed. See our note on the AI prompt copyright case in Shanghai.
Second, distinguish licensing of material from licensing of a voice. Permission to use a piece of audio is not the same as permission to synthesise that speaker’s timbre.
Third, watch the overlap between personality rights and copyright. See our note on AI authorship before the Supreme Court in Thaler: voice and likeness fall within personality rights, a different system from copyright in a work.
The technology for cloning voices is already mature; the rules are still catching up. Setting out the licensing chain clearly at the product design stage costs far less than responding to it afterwards.
This article is based on the text of US S.1367 and public information and is for reference only; it does not constitute legal advice.