Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’ With AI Proves Sound Trademarks’ Rise
Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’ With AI Proves Sound Trademarks’ Rise
Publish Date: 2026-06-01 04:30:00
Source Domain: news.bloomberglaw.com
Taylor Swift, one of many celebrities victimized by artificial intelligence, is fighting back against AI-generated sound clones that can now replicate voices to a remarkable level of accuracy.
TAS Rights Management filed trademark applications for Swift’s spoken phrases “Hey, it’s Taylor” and “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” to leverage trademark law against AI voice cloning. It’s an area that the Lanham Act—the 1946 federal trademark statute—wasn’t designed to cover.
Several states have introduced deepfake-specific legislation to address the threat, but the lack of a federal deepfake statute and varying state right-of-publicity rights have prompted some brand owners and talent representatives to turn to the Lanham Act for a solution.
Doctrinal hurdles and limitations on enforcement will make registering sensory marks a challenge. In the context of these constraints, the sound mark registration strategy appears to be a stopgap providing some protection against AI deepfakes while the legislative landscape catches up.
Registration Hurdles
A trademark can be any word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination of these things that identifies the source of particular goods or services and has three main requirements.
Distinctiveness: All trademarks can be inherently distinctive or can acquire distinctiveness through evidence of secondary meaning. This can include longstanding use, advertising, media coverage, and consumer recognition.
The opening chimes and tones that accompany streaming platforms function as source-identifying trademarks in the form of sound marks. Much like a visual logo, a sequence of consistently used musical notes can create a distinctive auditory signature that consumers immediately associate with a particular service, reinforcing brand recognition and recall. These sounds operate as mnemonic devices that signal the origin of content before any words appear.
Under trademark law, such sounds are protectable when they’re sufficiently…
