On May 26, 2025, China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) released the “Typical cases on the fifth anniversary of the promulgation of the Civil Code” (民法典颁布五周年典型案例) including one generative AI case in which the Beijing Internet Court held that an AI-generated voice infringed a dubber’s personality rights. Note that while China is not a common law country, designating a case as a Guiding Case or Typical Case is somewhat analogous to a U.S. Court marking a case as precedential in that the SPC is indicating to lower courts to adjudicate future cases in accordance with this decision. 

As explained by the SPC:

IV. Protecting voice rights according to law and promoting the development of artificial intelligence for good – Yin v. Beijing smart technology company and others’ infringement of personality rights case

1. Basic Facts of the Case

The plaintiff, Yin XX, is a dubbing artist. He found that the works produced by others using his dubbing were widely circulated in many well-known apps. After tracing the source, the sound in the above works came from the text-to-speech product on the platform operated by the defendant, a Beijing intelligent technology company. Users can convert text into speech by entering text and adjusting parameters. The plaintiff was commissioned by the defendant, a Beijing cultural media company, to record a sound recording, and the defendant was the copyright owner of the sound recording. Later, the defendant provided the audio of the sound recording recorded by the plaintiff to another defendant, a software company, and allowed the defendant to use, copy, and modify the data for commercial or non-commercial purposes for its products and services. The other defendant only used the sound recording recorded by the plaintiff as the material for AI processing, generated the text-to-speech product involved in the case, and sold it on the cloud service platform operated by yet another defendant, a Shanghai network technology company. The defendant, the Beijing intelligent technology company, signed an online service sales contract with the defendant, a Beijing technology development company, and another defendant placed an order with the defendant, which included the text-to-speech product involved in the case. The defendant, a Beijing intelligent technology company, adopted the form of an application program interface, and directly retrieved and generated the text-to-speech product for use on its platform without technical processing. Yin filed a lawsuit in court, requesting that defendant one, a Beijing intelligent technology company, and defendant three, a software company, immediately stop infringing and apologize, and that the five defendants compensate Yin for economic and mental losses.

(II) Judgment Result

The effective judgment holds that the voice right is a personal interest and concerns the personal dignity of natural persons. For the voice processed by artificial intelligence technology, as long as the general public or the public within a certain range can identify a specific natural person based on the timbre, intonation and pronunciation style, the voice right of the natural person can extend to the AI voice. The above five defendants all used the plaintiff’s voice without the plaintiff’s permission and committed acts that infringed the plaintiff’s voice rights, constituting an infringement of the plaintiff’s voice rights. Because the infringing products involved in the case have been removed, the five defendants will no longer be ordered to bear the tort liability of stopping the infringement. Instead, based on the plaintiff’s request, the subjective fault of each defendant and other factors, the court ruled that the first defendant, a Beijing intelligent technology company, and the third defendant, a software company, apologize to the plaintiff, and the second defendant, a Beijing cultural media company, and the third defendant, a software company, compensated the plaintiff for losses.

(III) Typical significance

General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized: “We must strengthen the research and prevention of potential risks in the development of artificial intelligence, safeguard the interests of the people and national security, and ensure that artificial intelligence is safe, reliable and controllable.” With the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, voice forgery and imitation are becoming increasingly common, and disputes involving infringement of personality rights caused by related technologies are also increasing. my country has written “voice” protection into the Personality Rights Code of the Civil Code in the form of legislation, reflecting respect for the rights and interests of natural persons’ voices, as well as a positive response to technological development and social needs. In this case, the People’s Court determined in accordance with the law that voice, as a kind of personal right, is person-specific. Unauthorized use or permission for others to use the voice in a recording without the permission of the right holder constitutes infringement, which sets the boundaries of behavior for the application of new formats and new technologies, and helps to regulate and guide the development of artificial intelligence technology in the direction of serving the people and doing good.

(IV) Guidance on the provisions of the Civil Code

Article 1018

A natural person enjoys the right to likeness and is entitled to make, use, publicize, or authorize others to use his image in accordance with law.

The likeness is an external image of a specific natural person reflected in video recordings, sculptures, drawings, or on other media by which the person can be identified.

Article 1019

No organization or individual may infringe upon other’s rights to likeness by vilifying or defacing the image thereof, or through other ways such as falsifying other’s image by utilizing information technology. Unless otherwise provided by law, no one may make, use, or publicize the image of the right holder without his consent.

Without the consent of the person holding the right to likeness, a person holding a right in the works of the image of the former person may not use or publicize the said image by ways such as publishing, duplicating, distributing, leasing, or exhibiting it.

Article 1023

For an authorized use of another person’s name or the like, the relevant provisions on the authorized use of other’s images shall be applied mutatis mutandis.

For the protection of a natural person’s voice, the relevant provisions on the protection of the right to likeness shall be applied mutatis mutandis.

The original text, including five other Civil Code Typical Cases, can be found here (Chinese only).