aceAI tool that copied actor’s ‘lustrous’ voice violated his rights, Tokyo court rules
A court in Japan has ruled that the human voice has legal protection after a landmark case involving a well-known actor and a TikTok account that he claimed had cloned his “lustrous” baritone voice in its AI-generated videos. Tokyo district court said on Wednesday that voices should enjoy the same protection as publicity rights, at the end of a closely watched legal action brought against TikTok by Kenjiro Tsuda – best known for voicing the character Kento Nanami in the anime Jujutsu Kaisen. But the court dismis…
A Japanese court for the first time recognised a performer's voice as protected under publicity rights, giving voice actors a legal basis to challenge unauthorised AI imitation.
The court still declined to order removal of the videos because the user had already deleted them, and the account had run 188 AI-voiced videos for over a year, so the ruling did not halt the harm itself.
The ruling's protection is conditional on use exclusively for commercial appeal, and the court did not order removal of the videos because the user had already deleted them. TikTok has not yet said what it will do next.
Evidence
- JournalismThe Guardian2026-09-30
How should this claim be treated?
Truvace Impact Record TRV-2026-1510, v1: “AI tool that copied actor’s ‘lustrous’ voice violated his rights, Tokyo court rules.” Truvace, 2026-10-16. /record/TRV-2026-1510 (accessed at citation time). sha256 ba205693b65eb3ce…
Calibration history
Every change to this record since certification, in the open. None yet — the reading has held since it entered the record.
Certified into the record
How to verify without trusting this page
Fetch the canonical text of any version from /api/record/TRV-2026-1510 and hash it yourself — for example shasum -a 256 on the saved canonical field. The result must equal content_hash, and each version’s text ends with prev:followed by the prior version’s hash (version 1 chains to 64 zeros). If a single character of any version had been altered since certification, the chain would not reproduce.