By Mark Seavy  

Celebrities and their agents are increasingly filing to trademark spoken phrases amid a growing threat from deepfakes generated by artificial intelligence (AI).  

Actor Matthew McConaughey was among the most recent round of celebrities filing with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to protect the rights to use of their voice.   

In the case of McConaughey, he is seeking to trademark “alright, alright, alright,” a signature phrase from the 1993 film Dazed and Confused. McConaughey has uttered the phrase multiple times since, including in his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards in 2014 where he was honored for his role in the film Dallas Buyers Club. And, in fact, the phrase itself was a riff on something that The Doors frontman Jim Morrison said multiple times during an April 1970 concert in Boston, MA.   

Yet while certain turns of phrase may stretch back decades, the need to protect them is coming to the fore as AI is trained and deployed across multiple fronts. A voice that may take an entire career to build can now be cloned by AI in a matter of seconds and used by content creators around the world in just hours. That leaves federal trademarks that can cross state lines as a strategy that carries weight in protecting IPs.  

And McConaughey is not alone in his quest to seek trademark protection for his voice.   

Popstar Taylor Swift, for example, and affiliated TAS Rights Management, filed in April to trademark the spoken phrases “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor” along with a specific photo from the Eras Tour (March 2023-December 2024) featuring Swift holding a pink guitar and wearing a sequined Versace body suit along with Christian Louboutin boots.  

In Swift’s case, her management agency is treating the singer’s voice not as a traditional jingle, but rather as a brand asset that would enable them to challenge identical reproductions and similar imitations in federal court. Existing copyright and right-of-publicity laws have struggled to combat generative AI, which can mimic an artists’ voice without copying a specific song or movie. Moving forward, trademarks provide a new legal angle. 

“Technology moves faster than the law, so people are trying to use every legal mechanism available to them to catch up,” said Jed Ferdinand, Partner and IP Chairman at the Meister, Seelig & Schuster law firm. “In the case of films, actors may not own the copyright [to phrases] because the studio or production company does. They [actors] may not have the right to enforce [trademarks from a film], so a federally registered trademark gives them a means for acting directly and not relying on the studios and [moving] much faster.”  

While trademarking celebrities’ voice is relatively new terrain, trademarking sounds is not.   

The NBC Network chimes, originally used in the 1920s as the program cue to signal the end of broadcasts, were among the earliest sound mark registrations in 1971. But others followed, including a lion’s roar, which Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Lion Corp. first used in 1924 but did not trademark until 1986 in signaling growing recognition of distinctive sounds as brand identifiers. And then there was the “Ho, Ho, Ho” tagline for the Green Giant brand that was tied to the giant’s laugh and was introduced in TV commercials in 1961 by the advertising agency Leo Burnett Worldwide. It was not trademarked by its owner, General Mills, until 2001.  

“The more recent filings are very specific, and they are not going to be broadly applied,” an IP attorney said. “They will apply to very narrow, specific use cases.”