Voice actors sue AI startup Lovo over unauthorised voice cloning
Lehrman and Sage say they were hired via Fiverr for research use only, but Lovo cloned their voices into 'Kyle Snow' and 'Sally Coleman' and resold them to customers.
- Courts & copyright
- Minor
Voice actors Paul Lehrman and Linnea Sage filed a proposed class action against Lovo, an AI voice synthesis startup, in the Southern District of New York. They said they had been hired through Fiverr in 2019 and 2020 for what they were told were one-off recordings for internal or academic research. Instead, according to the complaint, Lovo used the recordings to train its “Genny” voice generator and sold synthetic versions of their voices — marketed under the invented names “Kyle Snow” and “Sally Coleman” — to customers who used them in podcasts and advertisements without the actors’ knowledge or further compensation.
The complaint asserted claims under New York’s right-of-publicity statute, the Lanham Act and the Copyright Act, alongside breach of contract, fraud and unjust enrichment.
A federal judge ruled on Lovo’s motion to dismiss in July 2025: the court let the right-of-publicity, consumer-protection and breach-of-contract claims proceed, reasoning that Lovo’s continued use of a voice model trained on the plaintiffs’ recordings was an ongoing commercial use, but dismissed the federal copyright and trademark claims, holding that copyright protects only fixed recordings and not the abstract qualities of a voice a model might reproduce. The case became an early test of how existing publicity and contract law, rather than copyright, might govern unauthorised voice cloning.