【 Case 】 The plaintiff Yin is a voice actor who accidentally discovered that his voice had been AI encoded and sold it to the public on a platform operated by one of the defendants, a technology company. Yin sued a technology company, a software company, a cultural company and other defendants to the Beijing Internet Court, claiming that the defendant's behavior had violated his voice rights, and demanded to stop the infringement, apologize and compensate for economic and mental losses. The defendants all deny infringement. A certain technology company believes that the sound products on its platform have a legitimate source and come from a defendant software company. A software company claims that the sound it uses comes from the defendant, a cultural company. A certain cultural company believes that it has cooperated with the plaintiff and agreed that the copyright of the works recorded by the plaintiff belongs to them. After trial, the court found that a certain software company only used the plaintiff's personal voice to develop a text to speech product related to the case. The AI voice has a high degree of consistency with the plaintiff's tone, intonation, pronunciation style, etc., which can cause ordinary people to have thoughts or emotional activities related to the plaintiff, and can connect the voice to the plaintiff himself, thereby identifying the plaintiff's subject identity. Therefore, the scope of protection for the plaintiff's voice rights includes the AI voice involved in this case. A certain cultural company enjoys copyright and other rights over audio recordings, but does not include the right to authorize others to use the plaintiff's voice in AI format. Without the plaintiff's consent, authorizing a software company to use the plaintiff's voice in AI format has no legal source of rights. Therefore, a certain cultural company and a certain software company, without the plaintiff's permission, artificially transformed the plaintiff's voice, which constitutes an infringement of the plaintiff's voice rights. Their infringement has caused damage to the plaintiff's voice rights and should bear corresponding legal responsibilities. In the end, the court ruled that a certain technology company and a certain software company should apologize to the plaintiff, and a certain cultural company and a certain software company should compensate the plaintiff a total of 250000 yuan. [Statement] Our Civil Code has independently compiled the right to personality and incorporated the protection of "voice" into the Civil Code in the form of legislation, clearly referring to the application of portrait rights to protect the voice of natural persons, reflecting the legislative spirit of comprehensive respect and protection of personality rights. As a personal right, sound has the attribute of personal exclusivity, and the voice of any natural person is protected by law. The authorization of audio recordings does not mean the authorization of AI based sound. Without the permission of the rights holder, unauthorized or licensed AI based sound recordings by others constitute infringement. Currently, many short videos and reading apps use AI voice acting as dubbing. With the widespread application of AI speech synthesis technology, the phenomenon of sound being collected, synthesized, produced, imitated, and even tampered with is becoming increasingly common. The judgment of this case clearly determines that, under the premise of recognizability, the protection scope of natural person's voice rights includes AI generated voice. By judging the application boundaries of new formats and technologies, and clarifying the judicial attitude of balancing the protection of personal rights and guiding technology towards goodness. (New Society)