AI avatar consent and likeness rights

California is usually cited as the state where a performer cannot sign their likeness away. The statute is narrower than the reputation. A digital-replica clause becomes unenforceable only when three things are true together: the replica stands in for work the person would otherwise have performed, the contract does not describe the intended uses with reasonable specificity, and the person was not represented by counsel or by a union whose agreement expressly covers digital replicas.

Read the third condition again, because it does the opposite of what people expect. Having a lawyer at the table is what makes a vague clause stick. The protection is aimed at the unrepresented signer, and the practical lesson for anyone drafting a release is that specificity is what survives scrutiny: name the uses, not the medium.

Consent from a living person is a conversation. For someone who has died, California substitutes a rule, and it is worth knowing which way it cuts. Recreating a deceased personality’s voice or likeness in an expressive work without the estate’s permission carries statutory damages of ten thousand dollars or the actual loss, whichever is larger: a floor rather than a ceiling, so even a small commercial use is expensive.

The exemptions are wide in the other direction: news, public affairs, sport, comment, criticism, scholarship, satire, parody, documentary, and fleeting or incidental appearances are all outside it. Most editorial use of a dead public figure is lawful; most advertising use is not, and the gap between those two is where the money sits.

The question this guide keeps returning to, what happens if someone clones you anyway, got a partial answer in July 2025, when a New York federal court ruled on the claims brought by two voice actors who found their own voices being sold under invented names. The route through copyright closed: imitating a voice is not reproducing a sound recording, so a clone that sounds like you is not a copy of anything you own.

What survived is the more useful half. The court let their right-of-publicity claim proceed under New York’s civil rights statute, alongside consumer-protection and breach-of- contract claims. That combination decides where a case like this is brought and what has to be proved: not authorship, but identity and the terms of the original engagement. It is also the strongest argument for reading a recording contract’s scope clause before signing, because the contract claim is the one that did the most work.

Anyone drafting an avatar release from scratch is redoing work the performers’ union has already done. The SAG-AFTRA Commercials Contract requires digital-replica consent to be separate and written, a rider appended to the engagement or a signed separate document , and to rest on a reasonably specific description of each intended use, set out in a table the producer fills in use by use.

Two details make it worth copying outside union work. The first is the shape: a list of uses, not a blanket grant, which is the same thing California’s statute rewards. The second is the boundary the union itself draws, techniques that match long-standing production practice, such as motion capture or conventional CGI, do not need the specific consent, which keeps the form aimed at the thing that is genuinely new.