While calling voice a protected right, court dismisses voice actor’s AI case

The Tokyo District Court on Wednesday dismissed a demand from a high-profile anime voice actor that TikTok remove videos he says feature an artificial intelligence clone of his voice but recognized voice as a protected right.

While Presiding Judge Aya Takahashi ruled that voice is also subject to what is known as publicity rights — celebrities’ right to control and protect commercial gain from their identity, such as their name and image — she dismissed Kenjiro Tsuda’s demand, saying the videos had already been deleted.

As the use of AI to imitate the voices of actors and singers without permission becomes a growing global concern, the lawsuit was the first in Japan filed over a “voice rights” infringement using generative AI.

Tsuda, known for his starring roles in mega-franchises including “Jujutsu Kaisen,” sued the social media platform operator in November.

According to the legal complaint, a total of 188 videos narrated by a voice imitating Tsuda’s were posted from a specific account between July 2024 and September 2025.

The account had some 210,000 subscribers, and the average number of views for the videos was roughly 1.47 million per video, allowing the creator to earn between ¥500,000 ($3,100) and ¥750,000 a month. Many of the subscribers commented that the narrations sounded like Tsuda.

The plaintiff’s team said during the trial that they concluded through an analysis of the voice data that Tsuda’s distinctive “deep and lustrous” voice was intentionally created by generative AI. They said the act constitutes an infringement on publicity rights and a violation of the unfair competition prevention law that prohibits the unauthorized use of product labels.

The platform operator, however, argued that the person who posted the videos let generative AI learn their friend’s voice, and it is no more than a generic male voice. It also demanded that the complaint be dismissed, saying the account had already been deleted, along with the video data.

Regarding the issue of voice rights, the Justice Ministry’s panel of experts released guidelines in August stating that voices, like images, should be protected under publicity rights.