For the intellectual property expert, "as with image rights, the use of voice requires authorization and the user can charge for authorizing it".
Electronic Arts, the company responsible for The Sims, Dragon Age and FIFA, has created a tool that allows players' own voices to be used in characters. An Electronic Arts patent document reveals that the company holds a technology registration that would allow it to develop this unique avatar.
In The Sims, for example, you create your character and from now on it will be possible to record yourself speaking, and the avatar will reproduce your voice every time you interact with something or someone. According to what has been announced so far, the microphone would detect your voice and probably ask you to simulate anger, sadness, etc. Your character could exude various emotions in the most natural way possible.
For Marcelo Mattoso, a lawyer at Barcellos Tucunduva Advogados and a specialist in the Games and eSports market, the tendency is for immersion in games to increase with this new technology, but he believes that there may be legal challenges.
"In practice, this already happens in real-time online games that use voice chat. From a legal point of view, the sensitive point here would be the authorization to use the user's voice rights. Certainly the game's terms of use should provide for this type of situation, but even so, it could be debated in court, since most of these terms come by adhesion and cannot be modified."
Furthermore, according to Luiz Fernando Plastino, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property, privacy and data protection at Barcellos Tucunduva Advogados, copyright will have an impact to the extent that recording and reproducing the voice implies copyright over the content of what has been said and related rights over the way in which it is being said and, potentially, over the recording itself.
According to the expert, "as with the issue of image rights, the use of voice requires authorization and the user can charge to authorize it, but this will probably be resolved beforehand in the game's terms of use, which are a binding contract and can include an authorization of this type embedded in them."
Lawyer Luiz Fernando also explained that privacy is also a point that should be widely discussed with this patented technology.
"Voice can, depending on the context, be considered personal data on top of everything else, subject to the LGPD and other privacy and data protection laws. Users need to know that their voice is being recorded and how it will be used. If there is any kind of use that is not informed and justified, there could be privacy-related consequences, regardless of copyright or other types of rights. As for tools, you can see some way of generating a database of voices with users' consent. There are also some initiatives around the world to regulate the "sale" of data by law, but this is still debatable."
Source: Migalhas and BandNews