Should it be legal to build a robot that looks like your favorite Hollywood star?
Hong Kong product and graphic designer Ricky Ma recently built a life-size humanoid robot. The project took a year-and-a-half and cost more than $50,000. As Venus Wu at Reuters reports, the robot—called Mark 1—is “…modeled after a Hollywood star whose name he wants to keep under wraps.” The robot looks a lot like Scarlett Johansson.
Should it be legal to build a robot with the likeness of a celebrity, without that celebrity’s permission? As is often the case with evolving technology, the law is unclear.
Margot E. Kaminski, an assistant professor of law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law and an affiliated fellow of the Yale Information Society Project, takes a look at the issues involved, at least as they might apply in the U.S.
“Figuring out what to do about unauthorized celebrity imagery isn’t new,” she writes in Slate. “But with the democratization of robotics and 3-D printing, the question now has a new dimension.”
She cites several reasons why celebrities have some rights in their faces: privacy, for example, and the right not to be depicted endorsing a product they don’t like or a viewpoint with which they disagree. Further, they are entitled to profit from the celebrity they have built.
On the other hand, Kaminski says, many states recognize newsworthiness as an exception to celebrities’ control of their images. In addition, celebrities wouldn’t be celebrities without fans—shouldn’t fans be rewarded somehow for helping create the celebrity?
“This is the classic conundrum of the right of publicity: On the one hand, people probably deserve some legal protection in their identities,” Kaminski writes. “On the other, the stronger that protection, the bigger the impact on free speech and popular culture.”
Advancing technology poses further questions. Should video game designers be allowed to depict real football players in their games without the players’ permission? “So far, courts have not been sympathetic to the commercial video game designer,” Kaminski reports.
Further, she writes, “Courts already employ a trope of ‘involuntary servitude’ when analyzing the use of a particular person’s face in right of publicity cases. According to these courts, allowing use of a person’s face without permission is like forcing that person to work at a job, harming their dignity.”
That seems to me to bode ill for would-be designers of celebrity robots. “There’s a good argument that the real Scarlett Johansson’s personhood will be more affected by a robotic embodiment than by a fan’s drawing,” Kaminski writes. People empathize with robots that appear to be social actors. People mourn the loss of their Aibo dogs when they can no longer be repaired. Social robots are appearing in homes and businesses. (Prof. Nadia Thalmann at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore got around the legal questions by creating a robotic secretary in her own image.)
“A robotic Johansson appears to be acting in certain ways out there in the world, not just endorsing something the actress didn’t want to endorse, or appearing in a context where she didn’t want to appear,” Kaminski writes. “The more realistic the robot doppelgänger, the more blurry the lines between felt fact and fiction, the more harmful the robot actor is to the real actress.”
Kaminski’s article includes links to many other articles and touches on several additional points, including whether we should make lifelike robots at all.
She concludes by noting that we should be “…worrying about consumer protection when ScarJo bot asks you, in her husky voice, to buy her an upgrade. Scarlett Johansson the robot shows us that technological design is never neutral. It comes embedded with somebody’s values, and it’s worth asking whether those values are desirable.”
As for the immediate situation surrounding Ma’s bot, April Glaser in Wired quotes Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, as saying, “If [Ma] were to gain commercially in almost any way from this, and even arguably the notoriety he has gained from this, Scarlett Johansson could almost certainly sue him.”
