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this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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Donald Trump, while president, was impersonated by thousands of people as comedy acts. Some people even had full time gigs doing it!
It's not a illegal when you are doing it for comedy. Pretending to actually be someone who you are not, is fraud, but that's not what we're talking about.
Mimicking someone's voice or putting on a costume in their likenesses doesn't make it illegal.
If it did, then Elvis impersonator festivals would be a mass crime gathering!
Right of publicity has been a thing in American law since 1953. Not in every state, but in many of them, including California, where Will Sasso (who is responsible for this) lives.
You do not have a legal right to impersonate someone to publicize your podcast in California. That is exactly what he did.
So it was the fact that he used an impersonation to promote a podcast that's the issue, not the fact that there was an impersonation? Is that what the lawsuit is going after?
I think so. If you personally made "George Carlin AI Album #2" or whatever and put it on YouTube and didn't link it to some moneymaking venture, I doubt they would be suing. This is two comedians using a third, dead, comedian to generate revenue for their own comedy.
Even though the AI Carlin said numerous times that it was not the real Carlin?
It'll be interesting to see how this lawsuit develops.
Ford never said the singing voice was Bete Middler's in this case- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Such an idiotic ruling.
If someone can sing, with their own voice, then that's their singing voice. It shouldn't matter if it sounds like someone else, because it's not them!
It's idiotic because it essentially creates limits for talent and skill in an artistic sense.
There's a band called Greta Van Fleet who sounds exactly like Led Zeppelin, they've even done Zep covers, and it would be completely asinine to punish them (and fans) for having a certain sound.
Not even for comedy but for art in general.
If we couldn’t impersonate likenesses in art, art would fucking suck. Think of every fictional character who ever met a well-deserved demise that was inspired by a real person.
Hell, look at The Crucible. Required reading when I went to high school. Literally an allegory for the red scare and McCarthy’s communist “witch hunts” going on at the time of its writing.
Not just that, but being critical of the rich and famous, especially high-profile politicians, is an incredibly important part of art. It’s practically the origins of modern theater. And inversely, arts criticism is an incredibly important part of politics.