AI Voice Clones and the NO FAKES Act: Protecting Your Voice and Likeness as a Creator

Why Your Voice Is Suddenly a Legal Problem

In April 2023, an anonymous producer going by Ghostwriter977 posted a track called "Heart on My Sleeve" to Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube. The vocals sounded like Drake and The Weeknd, but neither artist had anything to do with it. The song pulled more than 250,000 Spotify streams and roughly 10 million views on TikTok before Universal Music Group filed a claim and the major platforms took it down. No human in that recording had agreed to sing a note.

That case grabbed headlines because it involved two of the biggest names in music. But the technology behind it does not care how famous you are. Voice cloning now takes only seconds of source audio, which means anyone with a few clips of your singing, your stream commentary, or your podcast can generate convincing fakes. Those fakes increasingly show up in scams: throughout 2025, deepfake videos of public figures circulated pushing fraudulent crypto giveaways, and impersonation scams of this kind have become more common.

If you make a living with your voice or your face, this is no longer a problem reserved for superstars. A cloned version of you endorsing a product you have never heard of, or releasing music you never recorded, can damage your reputation and your income before you even know it exists.

What Protects You Right Now

You are not starting from zero. Even before any new federal law, a creator whose voice gets cloned has real legal tools to reach for. The catch is that those tools were built for an analog world, they vary state by state, and a few of them don't cover the thing you'd assume they cover. Knowing which lever to pull, and where it falls short, is the difference between a strong takedown and a wasted week.

The right of publicity already treats your voice as your identity

The strongest protection most creators have is the right of publicity — the right to control commercial use of your identity. Two cases out of the Ninth Circuit established that your voice counts. In Midler v. Ford Motor Co., the court held that deliberately imitating a distinctive professional singer's voice to sell a product is actionable under California's common-law right of publicity. A few years later, Waits v. Frito-Lay affirmed a jury verdict for Tom Waits after an ad imitated his recognizable voice — confirming that an imitation, not just a literal copy of your recording, can violate your rights.

California also has a statute, California Civil Code §3344, that lists "voice" among the things — name, signature, photograph, likeness — protected from unauthorized commercial use. In practice, courts read the statute's "voice" to mean your actual voice, so a soundalike or AI imitation usually has to be chased through the common-law right instead. Both routes exist; they just attach at different points.

Where the protection gets uneven

The right of publicity is a state-law patchwork, and that's its biggest weakness for working creators:

• There is no general federal right of publicity — protection depends on which state's law applies.
• Only about half the states recognize a post-mortem right that survives you.
• Where it does survive, durations swing wildly — from roughly 10 years in Washington to around 100 years in states like Indiana and Oklahoma.

A common misconception is "I'll just copyright-strike the clone." Copyright protects a fixed sound recording or composition — not a voice itself. A fresh AI track generated in your voice, that doesn't copy a recording or song you own, may infringe nothing you hold the copyright to. The takedown that feels obvious often isn't available.

Two federal-ish backstops help. The Lanham Act §43(a) creates a nationwide false-endorsement claim — useful when a clone implies you endorsed something and confuses your audience (Waits sustained a §43(a) claim alongside the publicity one). And California's AB 2602 voids AI-replica clauses in contracts unless you were represented and the contract clearly describes how the replica will be used; most major platforms also run voluntary impersonation policies. These backstop a clear right — they don't replace one.

Tennessee's ELVIS Act: The First AI Voice Law

That "actual voice only" gap is exactly the hole Tennessee decided to close. In March 2024, the state passed the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act, better known as the ELVIS Act. Governor Bill Lee signed it on March 21, 2024, and it took effect on July 1, 2024. Rather than build something from scratch, the legislature amended Tennessee's Personal Rights Protection Act, a 1984 law that already protected your name, photograph, and likeness but said nothing about your voice. It is the first U.S. statute written specifically to stop an AI model from cloning how you sound.

The provision that matters most is short and deliberate. The amended law protects a person's voice "regardless of whether the sound contains the actual voice or a simulation of the voice of the individual." That single phrase reaches AI clones head-on. Where statutes like California's Section 3344 have been read to require your real recorded voice, the ELVIS Act covers a synthetic imitation just as fully, which is the precise distinction that lets a voice clone slip past older laws.

It also has real teeth. The amended Personal Rights Protection Act gives you a civil cause of action, including the ability to seek an injunction to stop the use and to recover actual damages plus the infringer's profits. On top of that, an unauthorized use can be charged as a Class A misdemeanor, putting criminal liability behind the civil remedies.

For working musicians, the standing rules are the underrated part. A recording artist can bring a claim even after signing "a contract for ... exclusive personal services as a recording artist or an exclusive license to distribute sound recordings" — so you don't surrender your voice rights the moment you sign with a label. Labels and licensees can sue too, which means the people most likely to spot a clone in the wild all have a way into court.

The catch is geography. As strong as it is, the ELVIS Act is one state's law, and a clone uploaded from anywhere else lives in a much grayer zone — which is exactly why a federal version is now on the table.

The NO FAKES Act: A Federal Digital-Replica Right

The federal version that Tennessee's ELVIS Act anticipated has a name: the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act, or NO FAKES Act. On May 20, 2026, a bipartisan group reintroduced it as S.4591 in the Senate and H.R.8915 in the House, with sponsors including Senators Blackburn, Coons, Tillis, and Klobuchar and Representatives Salazar, Dean, Moran, Balint, and Lee. This is the bill's fourth iteration, following a 2023 discussion draft and full versions in 2024 and 2025. Read the next sentence twice: none of those prior versions became law, and this one has not either. As you plan around it, treat the NO FAKES Act as a pending proposal, not a rule you can rely on today.

What it would give creators

The bill's core move is to create a federal, licensable property right in every individual's voice and visual likeness, enforceable against unauthorized AI "digital replicas." Unlike the celebrity-tilted right of publicity, this right would cover everyone, not just famous artists. The right is non-assignable during your life — you can license it but not sell it outright — and it becomes descendible after death. Note the term carefully, because it is often understated: the post-mortem right starts at roughly 10 years but is renewable up to a maximum of 70 years after death, not just a single decade. Licenses involving minors would require court approval.

How enforcement would work

The bill borrows the familiar notice-and-takedown structure from copyright law. Online services that promptly remove a flagged replica after notice would get a DMCA-style safe harbor from liability. The 2026 version adds a counter-notification process: a user can file a sworn, notarized counter-notice, and the provider may restore the content after not less than 14 days unless a lawsuit is filed. The reported June 18 vote was said to put up to $750,000 in platform liability per violation on the line — but that dollar figure comes from a single report and should be treated as unconfirmed, not as settled law.

The limits and the fight

The bill carves out the First Amendment: news, parody, satire, commentary, and documentary uses are exempt, and the 2026 version adds exemptions for nonprofit libraries and archives and for accredited nonprofit educational and research institutions. Supporters — the RIAA, major labels, SAG-AFTRA, and in 2026 the major platforms Spotify, YouTube, and TikTok — argue this broad backing gives it the best odds yet, with technical fixes added so it works for streaming. Critics see real danger. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argues the bill would create "a broad new intellectual property right" and "a whole new censorship infrastructure" with "few safeguards against abuse," leading to "hecklers' vetoes and other forms of over-censorship" that sweep up lawful speech. The free-speech group FIRE has voiced similar concerns. The practical worry for you: even if the carve-outs would protect your work, a small creator may not be able to afford to litigate them. Watch this one closely — it may move soon, but for now it is still pending.

What This Means for Your Contracts and Your Catalog

Whether or not the NO FAKES Act becomes law, the contract on your desk today is what decides who can clone you tomorrow. The catch is that most of those contracts were drafted before voice cloning was practical. A standard "name, image, and likeness" grant — permission to use your name, image, and likeness for publicity, marketing, and distribution — was written for a world of photographs, posters, and live performance, not synthetic ones. Boilerplate likeness language generally does not address synthetic performances at all, which is exactly the problem: silence reads as permission. If a clause lets a studio scan you for visual effects on one project, that is not the same as consent to generate an AI replica of you for the sequel, the trailer, or next year's ad campaign. Treat any blanket likeness grant as scope creep waiting to happen, and carve AI replicas out explicitly.

So before you sign anything, read your existing deals through this lens, deal type by deal type. On the label and recording side, your master rights agreement may already hand over more than you think — and you should know that even there, you are not entirely on your own (more on that below). With a distributor or aggregator, watch for "marketing and promotional" language broad enough to cover synthetic clips. In brand and sponsorship deals, the AI replica risk hides in usage and "derivative" grants. And if you have a manager, confirm who actually holds the pen on consent.

Across all of them, the move is the same: license narrowly, never assign, and treat digital-replica rights as a separately negotiated term rather than a throw-in. A well-drafted AI clause gives express, specific, and informed consent — and at minimum it should:

• Require separate written consent and compensation for each individual use, not a one-time blanket grant.
• Define the scope, duration, and territory of any permitted replica use in plain terms.
• Ban use of your performance for AI training by default, whitelisting only named vendors under an NDA.
• Require your explicit approval for AI edits such as de-aging or revoicing.
• Include audit rights and destruction rights so you can confirm how a replica is used and force its deletion when the deal ends.

That last point is not paranoia. Industry watchers have flagged a "troubling pattern" of voice artists who lent their voices to one AI project and later found they had been "cloned, commercialised and used far beyond what they agreed to." Without destruction and audit terms, you have no practical way to know — or to stop it.

One piece of reassurance: in some states the law backstops you even when the contract is bad. California's AB 2602 can make an AI-replica provision unenforceable unless you were represented and the contract clearly described how the replica would be used, and Tennessee's ELVIS Act preserves a recording artist's standing to object even under an exclusive recording or distribution deal. Useful safety nets — but they are no substitute for getting the clause right before you sign.

Actionable Next Steps

You don't need to wait for Congress to start protecting your voice and likeness. The legal tools that exist today are imperfect and uneven, but they reward creators who keep good records, read their contracts closely, and act before a problem becomes a lawsuit. Here is what to do now, in roughly the order it matters.

1. Document your assets. Keep dated records of your recordings and a baseline voice and likeness sample. If a clone surfaces later, you want to be able to prove what is authentically yours and when it existed.
2. Audit your existing contracts. Flag every "name, image, and likeness" clause and every AI or digital-replica provision in your label, distribution, brand, and management deals. You may have already granted rights you didn't realize were broad enough to cover a synthetic version of you.
3. Fix new deals before you sign. License replica rights narrowly rather than assigning them, refuse outright assignment of your likeness, require per-use written consent and compensation, ban AI training by default, and demand destruction and audit rights so you can verify the other side honored the limits.
4. Know your state law. Protection is uneven. Tennessee's ELVIS Act reaches voice simulations, California's Section 3344 and AB 2602 add real teeth, and many states offer far less. Where you live and where the infringer operates can change which claims are even available to you.
5. Monitor and respond. Watch for clones and use platform impersonation reporting when you find one. Remember that a copyright strike often won't work against a fresh AI clone that copies no existing recording; a right-of-publicity claim, a Lanham Act false-endorsement claim, or a state AI-voice statute may fit your facts better. If you're unsure which claim actually fits, get a clear read before you act rather than after a clone goes viral.
6. Watch the NO FAKES Act. It's a pending federal bill, not current law. Track its status, but don't assume it protects you yet or build your strategy around it.

This area is moving fast, and the right tool genuinely depends on your specific facts and your state. Having a contract clause or a takedown strategy reviewed before you act, rather than after a clone goes viral, is almost always worth the time.