Taylor Swift, brands and AI: the start of a new identity protection strategy?

Taylor Swift's recent US trademark applications, which include everything from sound bites of her voice ("Hey, it's Taylor") to visual records of iconic silhouettes from her Eras Tour, have captured the attention of the global legal community. This is not just about expanding an already massive trademark portfolio, but about a new protection strategy: trademark protection of personality traits.

Rather than a one-off reaction, it seems more like a deliberate strategy to shield identity in an ecosystem dominated by Generative Artificial Intelligence.

Traditionally, the protection of artists has rested on three pillars: Copyright (on the work), the Right of Image (as a personality right) and the Right of Publicity. However, AI has introduced a disruptive conflict: functional imitation. It is now possible to generate content that replicates a voice or appearance with astonishing accuracy without the need to directly copy a pre-existing work. This is where copyright may find more limits, and where trademark law emerges as the new perimeter of control.

Registering elements of identity as a trademark allows artists to move from the protection of personality rights, often extra-patrimonial and difficult to enforce in the face of automated uses, to the protection of industrial property assets. This strategy seeks to transform a human trait into a property title that allows action not only against identical copies, but also against similar uses that generate confusion in the market. By converting the voice into a trademark, the artist no longer only litigates for his or her "honour" or "image", but for the infringement of a registered commercial asset, which can simplify the burden of proof.

However, this approach raises legal challenges that have not yet been tested in court. A priori, for these applications to succeed, trademark offices (such as the USPTO or INAPI in Chile) will require that these features fulfil a function of commercial distinctiveness. The challenge will be to demonstrate that a voice is not just an attribute of a human being, but an indicator of business origin.

On the other hand, this sophisticated legal architecture requires considerable resources, which raises a question about the gap between established artists and emerging creators: will this be a democratic tool or a privilege of the big names to control their digital market?

Conclusion

Probably the most relevant aspect of the movements of figures such as Taylor Swift or Matthew McConaughey is not their immediate practical effectiveness, but their value as a "legal laboratory". They represent an effort to adapt classic tools to a technological environment that knows no borders.

While the law is slow to fill the regulatory gaps of AI, trademark strategy is positioned as a bold way to ensure that, in a world of synthetic copies, identity continues to have a legitimate owner.