AI, your voice and your face

What is actually being taken

A model does not steal your song. It learns the shape of it and makes something new that sounds like you did it. That is why “they copied my track” usually fails and “they cloned my voice” has to be argued under something other than copyright.

THE SONG

composition and lyric. Copyright covers this, here and everywhere. Unchanged.

THE RECORDING

the master. Also covered. Also unchanged.

YOUR VOICE

the timbre, the phrasing, the thing people recognise in three seconds.NOT a copyright work anywhere, including here. Where it is protected at all it is protected by publicity, personality or performers' rights, and the 1913 ordinance has no such provision.

YOUR FACE

NOT THE SAME GAP, and this is the good news on this page. Curaçao has had a PORTRAIT RIGHT since 1913. ARTICLE 20: whoever holds the copyright in a commissioned portrait may NOT publish it without the consent of the person portrayed — and for ten years after their death, not without their family's. ARTICLE 21 reaches an image nobody commissioned: publishing it is not permitted so far as a REASONABLE INTEREST of the person portrayed opposes it. ARTICLE 30 gives that person the same civil remedies a copyright owner gets, and ARTICLE 35 makes unauthorised publication a criminal offence.

That “reasonable interest” test in Article 21 is the most plausible existing hook on this island against a synthetic likeness of you. It was not written for AI and no court here has applied it to AI. But it exists, it is yours, and it is more than most places had in 1913.

YOUR NAME

here the gap is real. There is no general right of publicity in a name. Article 37 protects your name only against being falsely put on a work as its author.

Three places that did something about it, and none of them is here

TENNESSEE

the ELVIS Act, in force since 1 July 2024. It put “name, photograph, VOICE, or likeness” into an enforceable property right, and was the first US state law to name the voice specifically. Criminal as well as civil.

THE EUROPEAN UNION

the AI Act. Its transparency duties (Article 50) apply from 2 AUGUST 2026, with a transitional period to 2 December 2026 for marking systems already on the market. General-purpose model providers must keep a copyright policy, RESPECT RIGHTS RESERVATIONS a rightsholder has attached to their work, and publish a “sufficiently detailed summary” of what they trained on. Generated output has to be machine-detectable and disclosed.These duties bind a model OFFERED IN THE EU wherever it was trained — which is the part that matters to a small territory.

DENMARK

a proposal, not a law. It would add provisions to the Danish Copyright Act covering unauthorised AI imitations of performances and of any citizen's likeness, with carve-outs for parody and satire.It has been publicly contested at European level, so do not plan around it. It is here only to show which way the argument is moving.

CURAÇAO

no AI statute and no performers' provision. ButNOT nothing: the ordinance has carried a PORTRAIT RIGHT since 1913 (articles 20, 21, 30 and 35), which is a real remedy over your image that most people here do not know they have. See the section above.

Do not read “the EU has rules” as “I am covered”

What those rules realistically give somebody here is LEVERAGE IN A MARKET rather than a right at home: the obligation lands on the company offering the model in Europe. Whether you personally could enforce anything, from here, and in which forum, is exactly the question nobody on this page can answer for you.

Treat all of it as a reason to get the CONTRACT right, because the contract is the part you actually control.

The clause that gives your voice away

It rarely says “AI”. Read for these instead, in any release, session agreement, sample pack, remix deal or set of platform terms.

“IN ALL MEDIA NOW KNOWN OR HEREAFTER DEVISED” — the oldest one, and it is doing new work now. Written before models existed and broad enough that somebody will argue it covers them.

“TRAIN, ANALYSE, OR DEVELOP MACHINE LEARNING MODELS” — the explicit version. If you see it, it is a separate thing you are being asked for, and it should be paid for separately.

“NAME, IMAGE, LIKENESS AND VOICE” inside a grant of rights — that is your voice being assigned, usually for nothing, usually as boilerplate.

“PERPETUAL, IRREVOCABLE, WORLDWIDE, ROYALTY-FREE” attached to any of the above. Each word removes one of your ways out.

What to do this month

1. Search your last three contracts for “voice”, “machine”, “model” and “hereafter devised”. You are looking for what you already signed.
2. Set whatever opt-out or rights-reservation metadata your distributor offers, on everything. It is the reservation the EU rules are built around and it costs you nothing.
3. Put one sentence in your own session agreements carving out voice and likeness training, before somebody else's paper decides it.
4. Keep your masters and your stems. A model trained on a leaked stem pack is a problem you cannot unwind.

Every video below was checked against the channel that published it.

• EU AI Act — Article 50 transparency The transparency duties, in the text.
• European Commission — AI regulatory framework The Commission's own page on the framework.
• Tennessee ELVIS Act — the announcement The State of Tennessee, on its own law.
• BIP Curaçao Dated proof of authorship, locally. Cg 200 for five years.