On September 29, 2026, the Shanghai First Intermediate People’s Court issued a final ruling addressing what is described as Shanghai’s first case concerning natural-person voice-rights protection arising from AI-synthesized speech. The case centers on the intersection of generative AI training practices and personality rights, and its principal contribution is an evidentiary framework for proving infringement when a plaintiff has no visibility into how a generative model was trained. Note though that this case has not been marked as typical or …
Category: Right of Publicity
Early Jurisprudence from Beijing on the Intersection of Artificial Intelligence, Copyright and Personality Rights
On September 10, 2025, the Beijing Internet Court released eight Typical Cases Involving Artificial Intelligence (涉人工智能典型案例) “to better serve and safeguard the healthy and orderly development of the artificial intelligence industry.” Typical cases in China serve as educational examples, unify legal interpretation, and guide lower courts and the general public. While not legally binding precedents like those in common law systems, these cases provide authoritative guidance in a civil law system where codified statutes are the primary source of law. …
China’s Supreme People’s Court Designates Generative AI Case as Typical
On May 26, 2025, China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) released the “Typical cases on the fifth anniversary of the promulgation of the Civil Code” (民法典颁布五周年典型案例) including one generative AI case in which the Beijing Internet Court held that an AI-generated voice infringed a dubber’s personality rights. Note that while China is not a common law country, designating a case as a Guiding Case or Typical Case is somewhat analogous to a U.S. Court marking a case as precedential in that …
China’s Beijing Internet Court Recognizes Personality Rights in Generative AI Case
In an announcement dated April 23, 2024, the Beijing Internet Court of China ruled against a defendant that used a dubber’s voice to train a generative AI. Specifically, the Court held that the defendant use of dubber’s voice to train an AI voice generator infringed the dubber’s personality rights due to similarity of the voice generator output to the dubber’s voice. This same Court earlier held there is copyright in AI-generated images.