On Friday (April 24), Taylor Swift’s company TAS Rights Management filed three trademark applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office: two sound trademarks featuring her spoken phrase “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor,” and one visual trademark covering a photograph of Swift holding a pink guitar while wearing a multicolored iridescent bodysuit and silver boots on a pink stage, an image used as promotional material for her Eras Tour. The filings include a signed consent from Swift herself to register her “likeness, including but not limited to signature, voice and image, as a trademark or as a part of a trademark in the US and abroad.” The applications were first spotted by intellectual property attorney Josh Gerben of Gerben IP, who described them as “specifically designed to protect Taylor from threats posed by artificial intelligence.”
The move is legally significant in ways that go beyond celebrity brand protection. Registering a celebrity’s spoken voice as a trademark is a new application of trademark registration that has not yet been tested in courts. AceShowbizTraditional trademark law protects logos, slogans, and brand identifiers that function as source identifiers in commerce. Applying that framework to a voice recording is a novel approach to a problem that existing intellectual property law, particularly the right of publicity, has struggled to address at scale in the AI era. If the applications are approved and ultimately survive legal challenge, they would give Swift a federal trademark cause of action against anyone who uses a sufficiently similar voice or image in commerce without authorization, a potentially more powerful enforcement tool than right of publicity claims, which vary significantly by state.
Swift has been one of the most prominent targets of AI deepfakes in recent years. In 2024, sexually explicit AI-generated images of the singer circulated on X, forcing the platform to temporarily block searches of her name. That same year, AI-generated images falsely depicting Swift as endorsing Donald Trump spread across social media ahead of the presidential election. The trademark strategy is a direct response to those incidents and to the broader acceleration of generative AI tools that make creating convincing voice and image replicas accessible to anyone. One trademark attorney noted the strategy is designed to create a “legal perimeter” around her likeness as deepfakes become increasingly indistinguishable from reality. AceShowbiz
Swift is not the first celebrity to pursue this approach. Actor Matthew McConaughey had eight trademark applications approved by the USPTO earlier this year, including audio recordings and video clips, with his legal team explicitly framing the strategy as a tool against AI misuse. “My team and I want to know that when my voice or likeness is ever used, it’s because I approved and signed off on it,” McConaughey told the Wall Street Journal. “We want to create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world.” One of his attorneys added that the trademarks gave them the ability to “stop someone in their tracks or take them to federal court.” Swift’s filings follow the same blueprint, applied to a significantly larger public profile.
The broader industry context makes the timing of these filings important. Sony Music recently asked streaming platforms to take down more than 135,000 songs it says were created by fraudsters using generative AI to impersonate artists on its roster. The Music Universe Spotify launched a pilot opt-in feature allowing artists to review and approve eligible releases before they go live, designed specifically to protect artist profiles from AI misattribution. YouTube expanded its AI likeness detection tool to celebrities and talent agencies for the first time, building on a system developed with support from CAA, UTA, and WME. The Deezer data showing 75,000 AI-generated tracks uploaded daily and the label contracts now including AI training rights both reflect an industry scrambling to build legal and technical infrastructure around a problem that is moving faster than the regulatory frameworks designed to contain it.
What Swift’s trademark strategy adds to that picture is the concept of individual enforcement infrastructure. Rather than waiting for federal AI legislation, which has stalled, or relying on platforms to self-police, the trademark approach creates a direct cause of action that Swift controls. It is consistent with the broader arc of her career as an IP strategist: from re-recording her catalog as Taylor’s Version to redirect streaming revenue from Scooter Braun’s ownership of her original masters, to her recent lawsuit over the Showgirl tour, to these filings. Each move has been about creating or reclaiming legal leverage that the standard artist contract historically failed to provide. Whether the USPTO approves the applications and whether they hold up in court are open questions, but the strategy signals clearly where the most proactive artists are heading in the AI era.
