In an effort to provide its musical artists some protection from AI-generated deepfakes of their voices, the state of Tennessee recently enacted ELVIS seeking a cure. Specifically, Tennessee passed the Ensuring Likeness, Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act, which goes into effect July 1 of this year. The ELVIS Act replaced Tennessee’s existing rights law (the Personal Rights Protection Act, PRPA), which only protected a person’s name, photograph, or likeness and limited that protection to only barring use in advertising. PRPA also added postmortem rights in an effort to protect the state’s most famous resident, Mr. Presley himself. Interestingly, unique to Tennessee and two other states, the protected rights under the act are characterized as property rights as opposed to rights of publicity, which is more typical.
