Tennessee's voice statute also reaches the cloning tool's maker

The figure or the record

Tennessee's House Bill 2091 passed the House 93-0 on 5 March 2024 and the Senate 30-0 two days later, was transmitted to Governor Bill Lee on 21 March, and was signed into law on 26 March 2024 as Public Chapter 588, according to the General Assembly's own bill history. Section 13 of the enacted text sets the application date separately from enactment: 'This act takes effect July 1, 2024.' The act renames the state's 1984 Personal Rights Protection Act the 'Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act of 2024', the statute now generally known as the ELVIS Act.

What the documents establish

The act adds a statutory definition of 'voice' as any sound readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual, 'regardless of whether the sound contains the actual voice or a simulation' of it, extending the state's existing name-and-likeness property right to cover a cloned or synthesised voice for the first time. It also creates liability, in Section 6, for a person who distributes, transmits or otherwise makes available an algorithm, software, tool or other technology whose primary purpose is producing a particular identifiable individual's photograph, voice or likeness, when the distributor knows the resulting use was not authorised, reaching the maker of a cloning tool and not only the person who publishes its output.

Scope and caveats

The act keeps the existing exceptions built into Tennessee's publicity-rights statute: news and sports coverage, comment, criticism, satire and parody, and a person's own self-representation in a documentary or historical work remain permitted uses, unless the work is intended to and does create the false impression of an authentic recording the person actually participated in. The right is a state property right that binds conduct and distribution connected to Tennessee; it does not itself reach a platform or production based and operating entirely outside the state. The Governor's exact approval date on the scanned statute is partly illegible, though the General Assembly's own bill-history page independently confirms 26 March 2024.

What to watch

Editorially, the provision most worth tracking is the tool-liability clause in Section 6, since a claim against a voice-cloning app's distributor, rather than only against whoever uploads a clip, would be the first real test of how far a 'primary purpose' standard reaches against generative-AI vendors used in vertical-drama production.

• Is the disputed use a self-representation in a labelled documentary or historical work, which the statute exempts, or a use intended to pass as an authentic recording?
• Does a cloning tool's 'primary purpose' point at a specific identifiable individual, the standard Section 6 sets, or at generic synthetic voices generally?
• Did the conduct or distribution connect to Tennessee, since the right is a state property right rather than a national one?

A statute that reaches tool distributors as well as end users is a meaningfully different instrument from one that reaches only publication, and the ELVIS Act's Section 6 is worth citing by that specific mechanism rather than as a generic 'voice protection law'.