www.ibc.org/create-and-produce/re-animators-night-of-the-living-avatars/5504.article

“When your performance is captured as data it can be manipulated, reworked or sampled, much like the music industry samples vocals and beats. If we can do that then where does the intellectual property lie? Who owns authorship of the performance? Where are the boundaries?”

“Tracking use of an original data captured performance is tricky given that any character or creature you can imagine can be animated using the artist’s work as a base.”

“Conventionally, when an actor contracts with a studio they will assign rights to their performance in that production to the studio. Typically, that would also licence the producer to use the actor’s likeness in related uses, such as marketing materials, or video games.

Similarly, a digital avatar will be owned by the commissioners of the work who will buy out the actor’s performance for that role and ultimately own the IP.

However, in UK law there is no such thing as an ‘image right’ or ‘personality right’ because there is no legal process in the UK which protects the Intellectual Property Rights that identify an image or personality.

The only way in which a pure image right can be protected in the UK is under the Law of Passing-Off.”

“Whether a certain project is ethical or not depends mainly on the purpose of using the ‘face’ of the dead actor,” “Legally, when an actor dies, the rights of their [image/name/brand] are controlled through their estate, which is often managed by family members. This can mean that different people have contradictory ideas about what is and what isn’t appropriate.”

“The advance of performance capture and VFX techniques can be liberating for much of the acting community. In theory, they would be cast on talent alone, rather than defined by how they look.”

“The question is whether that is ethically right.”