Tennessee ELVIS Act and Voice Protection

Public Chapter 588, the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security (ELVIS) Act, was signed March 21, 2024 and took effect July 1, 2024. It amended Tennessee’s existing personal-rights law, renaming it and adding voice to the protected rights in a person’s name, photograph, likeness, and voice. The statute expressly includes simulations of a person’s voice. Rights may be licensed or assigned, and the statute contains separate rules for postmortem rights and non-use. The Act provides civil remedies for a person who knowingly publishes, performs, distributes, transmits, or otherwise makes an unauthorized person’s voice or likeness available to the public. It also reaches a person who distributes, transmits, or otherwise makes available an algorithm, software, tool, service, or device whose primary purpose or function is producing an individual’s identifiable photograph, voice, or likeness without authorization. The primary-purpose-or-function element matters: a general tool does not become unlawful solely because someone can misuse it. The facts about design, marketing, operation, and authorization shape the analysis. The Act includes exceptions for specified protected uses such as news, public affairs, sports broadcast or account, commentary, criticism, scholarship, satire, parody, and other statutory categories. These are not blanket permissions for every commercial imitation. Users and providers should read the precise exception text and consider other law, including copyright, contract, consumer-protection, and federal intellectual-property rules. The Act’s focus is unauthorized use of identifiable likenesses and tools centered on producing them, not ordinary voice synthesis with no identifiable person. A practical review identifies whose voice or likeness is generated, whether that person is readily identifiable, who authorized the use, how the tool is presented and used, and whether an exception applies. Keep consent records, license scope, source audio rights, and product-purpose evidence. Tennessee’s law is an important example of a state adding voice simulation to publicity protection, but its terms should not be generalized as a nationwide rule.