As the EU prepares to enforce its AI transparency rules this August, one pop star’s legal strategy is raising questions that European policymakers have not yet answered.
On 24 April, Taylor Swift’s company filed three trademark applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Two of them were for something unusual: her voice. Specifically, the phrases “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor” — short audio clips designed, according to trademark attorney Josh Gerben, to be “specifically designed to protect Taylor from threats posed by artificial intelligence.” The third application covered a photograph of her on stage — holding a pink guitar, dressed in a multicoloured iridescent bodysuit, standing on a pink stage in front of a multicoloured microphone with purple lights in the background.
The filings are unusual. Attempting to register a celebrity’s spoken voice is a new use of trademark registration that has not been tested in court before. Historically, singers relied on copyright law to protect their recorded music. But copyright, it turns out, was built for a different era.
“AI technologies now allow users to generate entirely new content that mimics an artist’s voice without copying an existing recording, creating a gap that trademarks may help fill,”Gerben explained. That gap is the crux of the problem — and it sits at the heart of a debate that is as live in Brussels as it is in Washington.
Why Copyright Alone No Longer Works
The logic of Swift’s filing is worth unpacking, because it illuminates a structural failure in the legal frameworks that artists — and regulators — have long relied on.
Copyright protects specific recordings. If someone samples a Taylor Swift song without permission, copyright law provides a clear remedy. But if an AI system trains on her voice and generates a new audio clip that sounds like her — without copying any existing recording — no copyright violation has technically occurred. Trademark law doesn’t just stop identical uses like copyright law: it stops anything that is confusingly similar to the registered trademark. That’s a much broader right and more powerful tool in an AI world.
Swift has filed more than 300 trademark applications in the United States alone, a strategy that helps to “reinforce” her brand, according to Leticia Caminero, an intellectual property lawyer at the World Intellectual Property Organization.But the new filings are different in kind, not just scale. They are an attempt to extend legal personhood — in commercial law terms — to the sound of her voice itself.
Swift’s likeness has been used without permission in numerous AI fakes, including by Meta’s AI chatbots and in pornographic images that have circulated on the internet. In addition, in the run-up to the 2024 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump shared AI-generated images of the singer inaccurately suggesting that Swift had endorsed him.
Europe’s Answer — and Its Limits
The timing of Swift’s filing is pointed. In August 2026, the EU’s AI Act will bring into force its Article 50 transparency obligations — requiring that AI-generated content be clearly and visibly labelled, namely deepfakes and text published with the purpose of informing the public on matters of public interest.
The EU is also finalising a Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, expected to be completed in May–June 2026, which will help establish shared standards and outline practical self-regulatory measures before binding rules take effect.
But experts have repeatedly noted that transparency obligations — however well-designed — are not the same as protection. The AI Act offers no remedies for victims, no penalties for malicious use, and only broad exceptions for satire and creative works, raising uncertainty about how the rules will apply in practice.
Italy has introduced criminal liability for distributing non-consensual deepfakes. Denmark is considering a likeness-based copyright model, giving individuals enforceable rights over deepfake misuse of their image. But there is no unified European equivalent to what Swift is attempting in the United States — a proactive, enforceable legal claim over the reproduction of an artist’s identity.
As one expert put it during a 2025 panel at the International Bar Association’s annual conference: “There is no universal remedy. Regulation will always lag behind technology, and deepfakes are evolving at a speed laws were not built for.”
A Model Europe Might Learn From
What makes Swift’s approach interesting from a European policy perspective is not the celebrity involved — it is the mechanism. Rather than waiting for legislation to catch up, her legal team has deployed an existing instrument — trademark law — in a novel way that creates immediate, actionable rights.
The theory pursued by McConaughey’s legal team — which Swift appears to be following — is that such trademark protections would provide additional legal remedies beyond traditional right-of-publicity claims to fight against AI-generated content that misappropriates someone’s likeness.
Europe’s equivalent to right-of-publicity protections are patchwork at best. GDPR provides some recourse around personal data. The Digital Services Act can compel platforms to act. But neither creates the kind of pre-emptive, portable legal identity that Swift is now building in the US.
The EU’s legal architecture was designed to regulate platforms and systems. It was not designed to give individual people — artists, public figures, or private citizens — direct legal ownership over synthetic versions of themselves.
That may be the next frontier. Trademark claims add a critical element of protection by enhancing the ability to obtain emergency injunctive relief and to recover more damages against the AI platforms themselves. In a European context, where injunctive relief under the DSA has proven slow and cumbersome, that speed matters enormously.
What Comes Next
The “trademark yourself” approach has not yet fully been tested in court with respect to AI. A Federal Court will need a case to stress-test the legal theories behind the filings. Swift may never need to file that lawsuit — the deterrent effect of a registered trademark claim may be sufficient to keep platforms cautious.
But the broader question Swift’s filings raise is one that European policymakers will need to answer before August, not after. The AI Act sets standards for platforms and producers. It does not yet give individuals — however famous — a clear legal tool to stop an AI from wearing their face, speaking with their voice, or representing their image without consent.
The regulation is arriving. The rights are still catching up.
Reporting and references include CNN ,Variety and European Commission.
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