Backstreet Boys are moving to trademark the sound of their voices, joining Taylor Swift and a growing chorus of music stars trying to protect themselves from voice cloning and AI deepfakes.
In a filing Wednesday (June 24) at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the iconic boy band applied for a trademark registration on an audio clip of the band saying “Hi, we’re the Backstreet Boys.”
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Lionel Richie applied to trademark his voice earlier this month, and Swift did the same months before that. Music’s biggest stars are concerned about the power of AI to create realistic fake content on the internet — and about their current lack of legal weapons to fight them.
The filings, obtained and reviewed by Billboard, were first reported by Josh Gerben, a trademark attorney unaffiliated with the matter. They cite an audio clip of the band’s five members yelling that line in unison. The band’s attorney did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday (June 26).
Trademarks on sounds are relatively rare. NBC owns one on its famous chimes, and AFLAC owns one on a duck quacking its name, but trademarks far more often cover brand names, logos and other visual symbols that help consumers identify goods and services.
The growth of AI technology has made it far easier to mimic voices, flooding the internet with such misleading content and leaving stars with little recourse. An individual’s name, likeness and voice have historically been guarded by right of publicity laws, but those laws have key limitations and no federal statute is squarely designed to address the problem.
A federal law designed to address that problem, the NO FAKES Act, passed a key Congressional committee last week and has a growing coalition supporting it. The bill would ban digital replicas of someone’s voice or visual likeness and require tech platforms to remove such content.
In the absence of such legislation, celebrities have turned to stopgap measures, including utilizing those old state likeness laws, or citing copyrighted content. Another is trademarking voices. Swift applied in April to register her voice saying “Hey, it’s Taylor”; Richie applied earlier this month, including his lyric “Hello, is it me you’re looking for?”
Such filings are an imperfect solution, and it remains unclear how effective they’ll be. Trademark law protects specific symbols, not a person’s overall identity; even if they win their trademark, it’s far from certain that it would give the Backstreet Boys any real legal power to stop someone from using their voice for different words. They also face hurdles just to get the trademarks in the first place, including trying to prove that consumers associate their specific sound mark with particular goods or services.
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