John Lennon AI Revival Adds to Debate Over IP Rights of the Dead

John Lennon’s voice will be on a new Beatles song once again—with the help of artificial intelligence—the latest in a wave of technologically reincarnated performers that attorneys say implicates a checkerboard of state publicity rights.

Paul McCartney told BBC Radio 4 this week the Beatles will release a new song later in the year, using AI to isolate and “extricate” Lennon’s voice from a demo tape recorded about two years before his death in 1980.

The rapid rise of generative AI has prompted more than just technological enhancements of already recorded voices. It’s also led to the creation of new music with artists’ voices mimicked using the technology, with some attempting to revive late musicians like Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and hip-hop legend the Notorious B.I.G.

In some states, however, using an artist’s voice after their death may violate state laws protecting performers’ right of publicity.

These laws, which vary greatly from state to state, protect the name, image, and likeness of a celebrity against unauthorized commercial exploitation. The drastic differences between states’ laws, though, can make protecting an artist’s legacy against AI a difficult battle to win, attorneys said, prompting calls for uniformity in the way these issues are addressed.

“It’s probably another reason why federalization of the rights of publicity is probably more important than ever,” said John Simson, director of the business and entertainment program at American University and former executive director of SoundExchange.

Back From the Dead

The Notorious B.I.G. never rapped Nas’ “N.Y. State of Mind.” Thanks to AI, however, listeners can hear him apparently doing just that. There’s also an AI-generated clip of Nirvana’s Cobain—who died in 1994—singing the band Hole’s song “Celebrity Skin.” Although Hole was founded by Cobain’s wife Courtney Love, he was never recorded performing the song while alive.

Recently, a TikTok user who makes AI covers of well-known songs with different singers’ voices posted an audio clip of Freddie Mercury singing Bryan Adams’ “Summer of ’69,” with the original instrumentals accompanying Mercury’s AI-generated voice.

“Of course it’s not legal to just take Paul McCartney’s voice, or John Lennon’s voice, but the technology is so easy to use and just out there that people do it,” said Manaswi Mishra, a research assistant at MIT Media Lab.

As of now, the legal ramifications for these creators could boil down to where the singer whose voice they’re imitating resided while alive.

California law grants heirs a transferable post-mortem right of publicity for 70 years after the performer’s death. New York provides protection against certain commercial exploitation for 40 years after the celebrity’s death. They are among 20 states that have enacted statutes to protect the right of publicity.

Other states have court-created publicity or privacy rights, which sometimes extend past a person’s life. Several states have unclear or no post-mortem rights, and in a few states, such as Alaska, it remains unclear if any rights of publicity exist.

“Typically you do have to have some kind of tie between the celebrity who’s looking to enforce the rights and the jurisdiction where you’re looking to enforce them,” said Naomi Jane Gray of Shades of Gray Law Group PC. “And that can be complicated.”

Artists’ Wishes

According to Simson, the deciding factor when considering whether to create new content in the name of a deceased singer or actor is a moral one: what they would’ve wanted.

“On the one hand, it’s wonderful when your favorite artist is all of a sudden putting up more music 20 years after they’re dead,” he said. “A little creepy, maybe, but it’s certainly not unprecedented.”

However, he said, when it’s something that the artist clearly wouldn’t have signed on for when they were alive and their estate believes they would’ve been disapproving, there should be provisions to protect the artist’s legacy.

Some celebrities, such as actor-comedian Robin Williams, considered the question of a post-mortem revival before their death. Williams, who died from suicide in 2014, in his will passed his California-based rights to a foundation and prohibited any commercial use of his image until 2039.

“He was very intentional about how his post-mortem rights could be exercised. In other words, he did not want them to be exercised,” said Gray. “Some people are planners in that regard and they think about that and they take those steps and other people maybe aren’t or they die unexpectedly and so they don’t shape how that is done themselves.”

Old Rules Still Apply

In the age of social media and viral sensations, AI-generated music’s audience can’t be limited to just one state. That necessitates federal protections to avoid the quagmire of enforcing inconsistent rights across states, attorneys said.

“I think it would be very useful to have a federal right of publicity law because these issues are so complex and so different from state to state,” said Gray. “If we could get some uniformity, it would really help.”

In the meantime, she said, existing provisions are just as applicable to AI-generated content as they would be to human-created works imitating well-known artists.

Using AI to impersonate someone could implicate their publicity rights in the same way as cases where sound-alike performers are used to emulate an artist’s voice, for which there is precedent.

In its 1988 Midler v. Ford Motor Co. decision, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit sided with singer Bette Midler, who had sued the automaker for releasing an advertisement that used an actor to imitate her voice and sing a song from one of her albums.

“AI is just a technology that’s able to do it at scale—and much faster, with less training data—but it’s the same kind of right of publicity as mimicking somebody’s voice or taking clips of them and then misusing the context in which the identity is represented,” said Mishra.

Attorney Mark Jaffe said he anticipates musician Rick Astley’s lawsuit against Yung Gravy over the rapper’s incorporation of a “Never Gonna Give You Up” sound-alike clip could also provide guidance.

“If some lawsuits are successful, perhaps that would lead to a licensing regime similar to what happened with sampling,” said Jaffe. “But it’s too early to know if that will happen.”

Judith Finell, a forensic musicologist, said when sampling started as a fringe part of the music businesses, no one took legal action in those early days.

“But when it became a big part of the music industry and started to interfere with the ability to make money,” she said, “the entire recording industry started suing people for doing it. And over a course of time there were enough lawsuits and they created a whole licensing mechanism for using samples.”

“AI is the sort of New Frontier,” said Gray, comparing the latest technology to hit the music business with the rise of Internet downloads.

Users and technology companies “just thought, ‘Oh, this is new, so therefore, the old rules don’t apply,’” she said. “The old rules are going to apply here to AI.”

—with assistance from Kyle Jahner