What the ELVIS Act does

It updates an older publicity statute

The act amends Tennessee’s Personal Rights Protection Act of 1984. The 1984 law already recognized property-style rights in a person’s name, photograph, and likeness. The 2024 statute is now titled the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act of 2024.

The practical change most often discussed is the addition of voice to that set of rights.

Voice includes a simulation

Under the update, “voice” is described as a sound in a medium that is readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual. That can be the person’s actual voice or a simulation of it.

That definition is the bridge to AI voice clones. A recording does not have to contain the real vocal take if listeners can still tell whose voice it is meant to be.

Unauthorized use is the target

The law is aimed at using a person’s name, image, likeness, or voice without authorization — including commercial exploitation and AI-generated copies that stand in for that person.

Legal summaries commonly describe several paths to liability:

• Using the protected attributes without authorization.
• Publishing, performing, distributing, or otherwise making the voice or likeness available to the public with knowledge that the use was not authorized.
• Distributing or making available an algorithm, software, tool, service, or device whose primary purpose or function is producing a particular, identifiable person’s photograph, voice, or likeness, again with knowledge that the resulting use was unauthorized.

Authorization questions for minors and deceased individuals are handled through parents, guardians, or estate representatives, according to those same summaries.

Civil claims and a misdemeanor

The statute provides a civil cause of action. It also keeps criminal exposure for unauthorized use as a Class A misdemeanor.

Tennessee Class A misdemeanors are commonly described as carrying up to 11 months and 29 days of jail time and/or fines up to about $2,500. Those figures come from the state’s general misdemeanor penalties, as restated in law-firm explainers — not from a unique dollar amount invented only for this act.

Commentary also notes that a party with exclusive recording-artist services or exclusive rights to distribute an artist’s sound recordings may be able to bring an action alongside, or on behalf of, the individual. Read the statute for standing details.

Speech-related exceptions

The update includes fair-use-style exceptions oriented to the First Amendment. Commentary lists examples such as news, public affairs, sports accounts, criticism, scholarship, satire, and parody, plus some advertising for those works, and fleeting or incidental uses.

The statute frames those uses as fair use “to the extent” they are protected by the First Amendment. Critics argue that this circular wording creates uncertainty until courts apply it to tribute acts, biopics, commentary, and other gray cases. Supporters argue that the First Amendment already supplies the limiting principle.