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Conversations with business leaders and changemakers on how they built their business and what keeps them going.
Pankaj Raval (00:00)
Welcome back to Letters of Intent, I'm Pankaj Raval.
Sahil Chaudry (00:02)
And I'm Sahil Chaudhary, corporate attorney here at Carbon Law Group.
Pankaj Raval (00:06)
This is a show where we break down the legal and business issues that matter to founders, operators, and growing companies.
Sahil Chaudry (00:12)
Today, we're diving into the new frontier of identity theft and Pankaj, we're going to need your expertise here. Pankaj, as you all may know, is Mr. IP. And today we're going to be talking about AI voice cloning and how deal makers can protect their most personal assets before the first byte of data is ever recorded. We're starting off with a huge warning. Your voice could be stolen while you sleep. And right now, the law is not fast enough to stop it.
Pankaj Raval (00:37)
So if you don't secure your vocal IP today, you may lose the rights to own your sound forever. Scary, right? Dun, dun, dun. So if you're a founder who does public speaking, a creator, or whose business kind of depends on your voice, or just a business owner trying to protect your brand's digital footprint, you need to listen closely. The legal landscape is shifting right beneath our feet.
Sahil Chaudry (00:57)
I don't know how many more shifts I can take here. Recent rumors are we're gonna find out that there are aliens. We're dealing with a lot of massive change all at once. So we're gonna need some help getting grounded here. ground this in what's happening right now.
Pankaj Raval (01:13)
I agree, man. All this all this change happening,
man, all this shit's happening today. This makes me want to take a nap. You know, there's so much going on in the world. know, we got wars, got AI, you know, threatening our jobs, our voices now. what it take? You know, I'll just tell you, anecdotally, like, you and I both kind of, spend a little time on social media, looking at it, studying getting news from it, as many people do and
Sahil Chaudry (01:17)
Yeah, seriously
Yeah.
Pankaj Raval (01:37)
The amount of AI slop and digital slop that you're seeing today is next level. Like I'm at a point where like, what am I even, why do I even watch this anymore? Like 90 % and half my time is thinking, is this AI? Is this AI? Is this AI? You know, so it's just, it's.
Sahil Chaudry (01:43)
Yeah.
Yeah, totally. That's so true. I mean,
I actually think that if today we found out that aliens had landed on would just kind of scroll past it. I think this is, you know, there was a time where that would be big news, but today we're dealing with the war, we're dealing with AI, we're dealing with a transforming economy.
Pankaj Raval (02:02)
Right.
Sahil Chaudry (02:12)
⁓ We're dealing with major, major changes and it seems like aliens are going to be the least of our concerns.
Pankaj Raval (02:20)
Exactly. I'm
ready to say like, yeah, just take me away, man. Just let's go. Let's go. Yeah, let's get to it.
Sahil Chaudry (02:23)
Right?
So let's get into this to make sure we know how
our voices don't get stolen from us. This is the property that you need to protect now. this is an interesting situation. Taylor Swift. So over the last week, Taylor Swift made headlines, not for a new album, but for a major legal maneuver. She filed three trademark applications specifically targeting her voice and image.
Pankaj Raval (02:30)
Let's do it.
Yeah, you're And, she's trying to trademark the of she's trying to trademark essentially her saying, hey, it's Taylor Swift, and hey, it's Taylor, along with very specific image of her on stage during the ERAs tour. And there's a reason behind this. Taylor Swift is one of the biggest stars in the world right now. she filled stadiums, she's got millions and millions of followers.
this makes a lot of sense for these kind of stars where their voice could be, hijacked essentially and taken over by unsavory characters leveraging star power.
Sahil Chaudry (03:21)
It's so interesting that she went the trademark route because usually when we think about singers, we're thinking about copyright, we're thinking about songs and lyrics, but we're talking about trademark because artists are now facing this massive wave of unauthorized AI deepfakes. It's exactly what you alluded to. You're looking online and you're scrolling past something. You have no idea if that's that person or not. And the traditional legal shields just aren't cutting it.
Pankaj Raval (03:45)
Exactly. this is the big issue right now. And this is the challenge of AI and especially a challenge of AI in an unregulated world, right? huge pushback about regulating AI people worry that, China, Russia, other people are going to be able to get ahead of us. it's going to create real negative externalities, real problems that we're to be seeing and we're going to be seeing even more of. I mean, this is the tip of the iceberg. With regard to Taylor Swift, historically singers relied on copyright law to
protect the recorded music, but with users to generate entirely new content and mimic voice without actually copying an existing recording. So, it actually mimics them. But does it violate copyright? definitely could. I think there claims for copyright infringement as well. it definitely is goes to brand goes to, the source identifier. And that's what trademark law is all about.
we saw Matthew McConaughey do something similar in January when he trademarked his catchphrase, all right, all right, all right, to establish a perimeter around his identity. So this is going to be coming up more and more with especially the stars and celebrities because their fame is their brand. Right. And their brand is So it's it's critical that they protect that. And in a world of AI, when it's so easy to copy something or someone
or someone's voice, the lines are gonna get blurrier and blurrier.
Sahil Chaudry (04:59)
Alright, alright, alright. The world is changing. if you want to learn more about that, we actually recorded an episode about Matthew McConaughey...
speaking with Timothy Chalamet about trademarking his voice. So spend a little more time with us on Letters of Intent. Celebrities are using trademark law to plug the holes left by copyright and right of publicity laws. What's fascinating to me is that we're watching a new branch of law emerge right in front of our eyes. And that's related to AI. when AI was unleashed on us, it
entered this environment that didn't have the rules and regulations that were ready to deal with it. It was dealing with the internet. dealing with, you know, when you think about communications law, the cable laws weren't ready to deal with the internet and the laws related to the internet aren't really ready to deal with AI yet.
Pankaj Raval (05:48)
Right. Exactly. Exactly. And that's the thing about the law, man. as you and I know, and I think, you know, being business and operators for so many years, you realize, you know what, the law is very slow to catch up and we're in technology is moving so fast. It's going to take years for the law to catch up and for these bad actors to really be held accountable. So, it's kind of the Wild West right now going on in AI how it's going to be.
affecting businesses, entrepreneurs, celebrities and the likes because unfortunately, just the law cannot keep up with what's happening, especially in a global environment and the Internet where people in Pakistan or people in, the Philippines could be, could be doing this. And what's your recourse against them? It's going to be a lot harder to catch these bad actors, which is why we need, smart, consistent regulation now.
Sahil Chaudry (06:34)
Exactly.
So that's the big shift we wanna talk about today. As a deal firm, we want to identify new asset classes that you should be negotiating when it comes time to make a deal for something like your voice.
This is new asset class and you need to be able to trademark it and there are new applications. When trademark laws were written, they did not anticipate that you would be able to have a deep fake AI voice of someone else. so now until the law catches up, contracts need to play that role. So I want to get into some mechanics. What is the very first thing that needs to change in a modern contract that addresses AI?
Pankaj Raval (07:03)
Absolutely.
getting into mechanics here, you know, I think you've got to look at the rights that are being conferred, right? Like any, if you're doing deals in 2026, you know, especially with these bigger companies, AI, you have to look out for language related to AI and the use of your name, image likeness, and voice even, right? Like you need to be...
aware of what are the rights you're giving up in contracts. have to look at training models. You have to look at words like neural training, network, LLM, any kind of IP-related authorized any language around IP you've got to be really keyed into because now more than ever, a lot of these companies are going to be expanding
Sahil Chaudry (07:38)
models.
Pankaj Raval (07:53)
their claimed use and rights of the work that they're contracting.
Sahil Chaudry (07:56)
Exactly, we see this a lot when it comes to entertainers or actors.
And the contract says that they have the right to use that person's name, image, likeness and voice for future training models. And essentially that means you're giving your name, image, likeness and your voice in perpetuity to a company. Oftentimes the company is asking for that and we need to limit those the use of your name, image, likeness, your voice as much as possible. There need to be time limits. there need to be geography limits.
When you're looking at an agreement and it's using you as the product, just keep in mind that you need to keep some limit on the application of your identity.
Pankaj Raval (08:37)
Absolutely, Sahil, in the past, if you signed a standard media release or work for a higher agreement, the company owned the recording or the production.
Today, however, the companies are using that broad outdated language to justify scraping your audio to train their AI models. have to think about all this data out there exists, and now it's being mined to train these models. Think about how much footage there is out there that these models are training on.
Sahil Chaudry (08:58)
I could imagine I'm just scrolling on Instagram and I find an image of me promoting a brand I don't like or using my voice to sell some kind of product I don't like.
And also there are certain situations you might not want to see your image in. Eventually we're going to see AI actors that are coming out. If you're able to essentially take what's a hologram of someone and place it in circumstances that the person didn't originally intend, that's a totally different intent than what was originally behind the Work Made For Hire concept.
in Work Made For Hire, can ring fence, okay, we created this together. Let's say a photo shoot, for example, or a film. You know the situation you were in. You know the other people who are around you. You know the clothes you were wearing. You know the lines you had to say. But now, if a company could take my image and my voice and place it in a completely new circumstance, there is an unlimited and unchecked right
to use my personal brand for a purpose I didn't anticipate. And that's something that we will fight for. And that's something that you have to fight As someone who's negotiating those kinds of rights, you need to know that you have a right to fight for your image.
Pankaj Raval (10:08)
Absolutely Sahil. So that brings us to massive issue here is the term of the agreement. A lot of these agreements will if you're not careful, ask for your rights in perpetuity and that you really needs to be addressed and modified if you're seeing that in agreements, because if it says in perpetuity, now you're giving your rights forever. And that's not a good thing because
The world is changing fast and why shouldn't you be able to on your name, likeness or other it might be in the future? And essentially you could be giving up that right if that agreement says in perpetuity.
Sahil Chaudry (10:41)
In perpetuity is, those are very scary words in the era of the digital age. If you give up rights forever, you have no leverage when the technology evolves.
Pankaj Raval (10:50)
Absolutely, So really, we need term limits. We need to specify usage and types of usage and ways you use the And when it comes to voiceovers, when we're talking about voice, if you record a voiceover for a marketing campaign, the contract must state that the audio is only for that specific campaign.
in California, there are laws coming out around the country, but in California there are specific laws regarding that if they're gonna use that information for AI or if they're gonna use that content in AI, has to be explicitly stated in the contract. So just be aware of that. you did something and then you see it's being used in AI, you should let them know that, you didn't give this authorization.
And there's specific contract language that's required for them to be able to do that.
Sahil Chaudry (11:33)
So you want to make sure that your drafting language explicitly excludes the right to use any of your recordings for machine learning, data scraping, or synthetic voice generation. You have to carve it out or it's included. But, Pankaj, what happens if a company does want to license a synthetic replica of your voice? How should we structure that?
Pankaj Raval (11:52)
So Sahil, you need to structure a separate deal for that. You need to establish.
residuals for replicas. You should also be getting paid for every single time your synthetic voice is deployed and not just for the hours you spent in the recording booth.
Sahil Chaudry (12:03)
Okay, so let's talk about structure and the ways that founders and prominent creators can insulate this asset. We need to talk about the right of publicity, which I know, Pankaj, you engage with a lot in many of the deals you do.
Pankaj Raval (12:16)
Right, absolutely, absolutely. So the right publicity is really, really important. kind of crosses over with a lot of trademark issues, copyright issues. You know, if you're doing deals, really in the content space or marketing, entertainment, you need to really consider how you're going to protect your right of publicity. And that means your name, image, maybe even transfer them into a
dedicated LLC or trust or company corporation, professional services corporation, whatever it might be to protect it and to ensure you can leverage it in the future.
Sahil Chaudry (12:48)
I actually love that idea.
mean, if you transfer your name image likeness rights into an LLC, you basically, you become the business. Now, whatever income you earn on that, you would be able to expense any deductible expenses against that. Plus you have limitation of liability. Let's say you get sued.
Pankaj Raval (12:57)
Right.
Sahil Chaudry (13:06)
So there are some benefits I could see to placing those rights or right of publicity into a corporate container or company container. if a breach occurs and someone closed your voice, having those rights housed in a corporate entity can make enforcement and calculated damages much more straightforward.
And then that's the entity that's signing the contract on your behalf. And you're going to have expenses. You're to have to pay lawyers to negotiate those kinds of deals. So that'll keep your books clean. It'll keep your licenses clean. And eventually, if that asset becomes very, very valuable, you could raise capital in it.
Pankaj Raval (13:37)
Exactly, exactly.
Sahil Chaudry (13:39)
And so I want to pivot to the tech itself. Even if your contract drafting is flawless, you still have to record the audio somewhere.
Pankaj Raval (13:47)
Absolutely. And this is where due diligence comes in. You or your lawyer or whoever advisor needs a terms of service audit on the recording software and hosting platform you use. Because, who knows? we're using Riverside and, we got to make sure that Riverside is anthropic AI
train on this data and review those terms of service and privacy policy, they very well could.
Sahil Chaudry (14:11)
Right, Pankaj, we're looking at the fine print. We're looking at data processing agreements. We're looking at how the tools we use are using and controlling our data. So really, we're talking about data sovereignty.
Pankaj Raval (14:20)
Absolutely, yeah. Data sovereignty is exactly what we're looking at. We need to know exactly where audio data is being stored, who has access to it, and critically, who has the right to delete it. If the platform's default terms say that they can use user-generated content to improve their services, which is code for AI training, you have some concerns.
Sahil Chaudry (14:38)
Yeah, absolutely. Then that means your voice is locked away forever with whatever tool you're using. So, okay, let's wrap this up with some immediate actionable advice for our audience. If you're a founder or small business owner listening right now, we want you to ensure that you're auditing your current contracts.
If you don't have an AI exclusion clause, it's time to prepare to renegotiate. And step two is you need to check the terms of service on the platforms where your media is hosted. So number one, when you're doing a deal, you need to narrow the scope and the time.
that you are permitting a third party from using your right of publicity, your voice, your any kind of image related rights. And second, you might be silently giving those rights away if you haven't audited the licenses of the tools you're using.
So we don't want you to wait for Congress to pass a law because that's gonna take forever. You know, they're dealing with aliens right now. So you have to build your own protective mode. And you do that with contract drafting.
Pankaj Raval (15:36)
Contract drafting and yeah, being proactive. Exactly. your voice is your asset, especially in entertainment. if you're one of the 50 million people that have a podcast today, you've got to make sure that your voice is being protected recognize that there is a likelihood that there's going to be data leakage out there. So, if you want to be proactive, if you're concerned about this, you should probably be sending out letters, you maybe saying, hey,
I use this and I don't want my information sold, being stored. And then, that creates a affirmative obligation on these platforms to protect your data and your voice. You may not be able to use those platforms, if that's their terms. But at least if you're very concerned about this and how your voice is being proactive and take steps to notify these platforms that you don't want to use this way. So because the onus is on them.
to ensure they comply terminate your agreement. But these are all contract terms that can be negotiated sometimes. And other times, you just got to be aware that maybe that's not a service you want to use if they're going to your assets in such a way.
Sahil Chaudry (16:36)
That's right. Well, to our audience, thank you so much for listening to this episode.
That's absolutely right. That's all for today's episode of Letters of Intent. If you're out there in the audience, do not record my voice and include it on any of your memes that you're putting out on social media because you need to get my license first. I'm looking to make some money off this
Pankaj Raval (16:57)
Exactly. He's worked hard to cultivate this. This didn't happen overnight, ladies and gentlemen. ⁓ This took many years, 30 some odd years. We won't say how many, but we'll say it took a while to get this, you know? So he's not giving it up that easy. you'll definitely be hearing more from us about this in the future. next time, everyone, we hope you continue to do.
Sahil Chaudry (17:01)
This did not happen overnight.
You'll be hearing from my lawyer. Yeah.
Pankaj Raval (17:19)
Make big deals, swing for the fences. And looking for a legal partner, Carbon Law Group is here to support you along the way. Best luck with building and growing. Thank you again for listening to Letters of Intent. Like, follow, share for more. And we always love to hear from our listeners to see ways we could actually improve the podcast or answer any specific questions you