Tokyo Court First to Recognize Voice Rights: AI-Cloning a Voice Actor's Voice Can Infringe

A TikTok account gained over 200,000 followers on a “borrowed” voice and got sued by its owner. On September 30, the Tokyo District Court ruled: a person’s voice, like their face, is protected by law.

An Account Built on a “Borrowed” Voice

It started with a TikTok account. Named “Nanami,” it posted about 188 videos between July 2024 and September 2025 — urban legends, occult lore, the kind of spooky-story content — narrated by a deep, resonant male voice.

The voice sounded exactly like one person: Kenjiro Tsuda, the 55-year-old veteran Japanese voice actor behind Nanami Kento in Jujutsu Kaisen and Seto Kaiba in Yu-Gi-Oh!. He never recorded any of these videos. The voice was AI-cloned.

The account grew past 200,000 followers on that “borrowed” voice. Reports say the videos earned hundreds of thousands of yen per month.

Tsuda took TikTok to court, demanding the videos be removed. It’s Japan’s first lawsuit fought over voice rights.

How the Court Ruled

In the Tokyo District Court’s ruling, presiding judge Aya Takahashi made two key statements.

The first: “Using a performer’s voice without permission… can constitute an infringement of publicity rights.”

The second: a person’s voice, “like one’s likeness, is a symbol of personhood.” Protection applies when the use of the voice has “the sole purpose of profiting from its commercial value.”

This is the first time a Japanese court has confirmed in a ruling that voices, like faces, are protected by publicity rights.

In court, TikTok argued the videos used only a “generic male voice” and that resemblance is subjective. The judge didn’t buy it.

Tsuda didn’t win everything, though. The court rejected his request to have the videos removed, reasoning that the account had deleted them on its own during the proceedings, so TikTok had “no remaining obligation to delete.” The court also didn’t rule that the 188 videos specifically constituted infringement. Tsuda’s lawyer Takashi Hirano called the ruling one that “made both sides look like winners.”

Why the “First” Matters

Japan currently has no statute expressly defining voice rights. The Ministry of Justice recently issued guidance saying that uploading AI voices closely resembling real people to social media for profit could constitute infringement. But guidance isn’t a ruling — this is the first time a court has written “voices are protected by publicity rights” into a judgment.

For Japan’s voice-acting industry, this is a long-awaited shield. A voice actor’s voice is their livelihood; as AI voice cloning gets easier, unauthorized “voice actor narrations” on social media have proliferated. This ruling gives them a legal basis they can cite directly.

Globally, performer protections are filling the same gap: faces are already covered by publicity rights; voices have been left hanging. Japan’s ruling got there first — and courts in more countries will soon face the same question: who does an AI-cloned voice belong to?