TikTok Allegedly Used Canadian’s Voice for Narration Feature Without Permission
As reported by the CBC, Canadian voice actor Bev Standing is suing TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, for violating her copyright to her voice.
The claim alleges that TikTok’s text-to-audio feature uses her voice to narrate videos. The feature allows TikTok's close to 690 million users to type out text and then have it read aloud over their videos.
In 2018, Standing was hired to do recordings for a Chinese-government research organization. Her job was to read thousands of English sentences that would be used for translations. She believes that these recordings fell into TikTok’s hands. The terms of her contract with the research organization have not been reported.
Standing is seeking compensatory and punitive damages, claiming that she has suffered significant injury and irreparable harm from being deprived of the ability to control her reputation.
Author: Meghan King
Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/@dylu
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