Can You Trademark Yourself? Inside Matthew McConaughey Legal Strategy to Fight AI Theft
Matthew McConaughey sat before a roomful of aspiring young actors and filmmakers this February at his alma mater, the University of Texas at Austin. He was speaking at Variety and CNN’s town hall that featured the “Dallas Buyers Club” Oscar winner alongside his “Interstellar” co-star Timothée Chalamet.
McConaughey had just been asked about the future of Hollywood, given the astonishing advances of AI. He issued a call to arms. “It’s already here,” he said. “It’s not going to be enough to sit on the sidelines and make the moral plea that ‘No, this is wrong’; there’s too much money to be made, and it’s too productive. So I say, own yourself — voice, likeness, etc. Trademark it, whatever you gotta do, so when it comes, no one can steal you.”
In 2023, McConaughey and his legal team filed for eight trademarks. Those included a sound mark on audio of the actor saying, “Alright, alright, alright!” — his memorable line from the 1993 comedy “Dazed and Confused” — a seven-second video clip of him standing on a porch; a three-second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree; and audio of him saying, “Just keep livin’, right? I mean, what are we gonna do?”
In 2025, after two years in review, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted the trademarks. In a statement, McConaughey explained his reasoning: “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. We want to create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world.”
Last month, Taylor Swift followed McConaughey: On April 24, Swift’s company filed three trademark applications with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office covering her voice and image. Two relate to sound trademarks covering her voice (for “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and “Hey, it’s Taylor”) and the third is a visual trademark covering “a photograph of Taylor Swift holding a pink guitar, with a black strap and wearing a multi-colored iridescent bodysuit with silver boots.” The move comes after Swift has been the repeated target of AI fakes. (Swift’s reps did not respond to requests for comment.)
Taylor Swift filed for trademark protection on this image in April.
Celebrities securing trademarks isn’t anything new. Swift has registered more than 400 trademarks worldwide, including for her album and tour names, her song lyrics and even the names of her three cats, “Meredith, Olivia & Benjamin Swift.” But trademarks aren’t designed to protect an individual’s general likeness, voice or persona. And that’s what McConaughey and Swift are trying to do.
Their concerns come as generative AI has advanced in recent months to be able to produce shockingly realistic audio and video. “The rise of generative AI and its ability to provide uncanny likenesses at a speed and scale has stretched IP laws to a point we haven’t seen before,” says Chris Mammen, partner at Womble Bond Dickinson, who co-founded the firm’s AI practice.
It’s already possible to fully create an AI replica that looks and sounds exactly like a human actor. The digital avatar of Val Kilmer, the “Doors” actor who died in April 2025, will appear in the upcoming indie film “As Deep as the Grave,” despite Kilmer never having shot a scene for the film. The actor’s family says it approved the re-creation of Kilmer in the movie, which SAG-AFTRA requires in such cases.
Studios have been careful to respect the rights of actors as the companies adopt AI. But they’re making moves to harness the technology for their own benefit. Disney was in the midst of working to get versions of Mickey Mouse, Cinderella, Captain America and more into OpenAI’s Sora system so fans could make AI-based animations — but OpenAI shut down Sora before that could happen.
When the deal was still active, though, Disney’s then-CEO, Bob Iger, told CNBC that the prospect “gives us an opportunity to play a part in what really is breathtaking growth.”
Meanwhile, Netflix in March announced that it was acquiring Ben Affleck’s InterPositive startup, which has developed AI tools for filmmakers. Bela Bajaria, the streamer’s chief content officer, asserted that AI “should expand creative freedom, not constrain it or replace the work of writers, directors, actors and crews.”
Regarding McConaughey’s “trademark yourself” strategy, the thinking is that his lawyers would have an additional legal arrow in their quiver if they were to challenge an AI-generated replica that tried to capitalize on the actor’s image and likeness without permission. Individual states, including New York and California, have “right of publicity” laws that prevent unauthorized commercial use of a person’s image and likeness. But trademark infringement lawsuits can be filed in federal court — a potentially greater deterrent to misuse, because those cases apply nationwide.
“I don’t know what a court will say in the end. But we have to at least test this,” says Kevin Yorn, partner at Yorn Levine, the law firm that represents McConaughey.
To be clear, McConaughey isn’t an anti-AI crusader. The actor recently announced a partnership with AI voice company ElevenLabs (in which McConaughey is also an investor) to translate his newsletter “Lyrics of Livin’” into Spanish using a likeness of his voice.
Hollywood’s actors and writers unions, after winning AI protections in bargaining with studios, remain concerned about the potential misuse of the tech. “SAG-AFTRA believes every person has an inalienable right to their name, voice and likeness,” the union says in its philosophy statement on AI. Under SAG-AFTRA’s new four-year deal with studios reached earlier this month, the studios agreed to use synthetic performers only if they bring “significant additional value” to a project. The pact also requires studios to notify and bargain with the union if they license performances for AI training. But as some observers point out, the language is fairly broad and open to interpretation.
In January, more than 700 actors, writers and creators, including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, launched their own anti-AI campaign. The entertainment ecosystem is being threatened, they say, because AI companies are pilfering creative work. “Stealing our work is not innovation. It’s not progress. It’s theft — plain and simple,” the group said in a letter. Blanchett is the co-founder of RSL Media, a not-for-profit company that in June plans to launch a free registry for people to grant — or deny — consent for AI use of their creative work, name, image and likeness.
So there’s been keen interest in McConaughey’s strategy. The curiosity about it “embodies this growing concern in the industry that the existing legal tools we have for protecting images and likeness of public figures aren’t adequately built for AI,” says Frank D’Angelo, partner at law firm Loeb & Loeb.
There definitely are not enough protections for artists and public figures at this point, says Chris Jacquemin, head of digital strategy at WME, which reps McConaughey. “It feels like there are gaps.” The approach taken by McConaughey and his attorneys promises to be “a step toward significant protections for likeness, on a level we have had with intellectual property,” Jacquemin says.
In theory, an actor with such trademark protections could issue takedown claims against an AI platform similar to the way a studio can enforce its copyrights. Last December, for example, Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, alleging the tech giant’s Gemini AI platform was being used to illegally generate copies of dozens of its characters. By the next day, Google had pulled down the offending videos.
“In a world where we’re watching everybody scramble to figure out what to do about AI misuse, we have a tool now to stop someone in their tracks or take them to federal court,” says Jonathan Pollack, Yorn Levine of-counsel attorney, who worked with McConaughey on the trademarks.
But how well McConaughey’s trademarks will work in practice remains a big question. For starters, a trademark doesn’t exist independently of goods or services that are offered in association with it. To be enforceable, trademarks have to be used in a way that a consumer would perceive as being part of something tangible they can buy, says Matthew Asbell, an IP attorney at law firm Lippes Mathias. “You don’t just own words or recordings of words.”
McConaughey has held a trademark on the phrase “Alright, alright, alright” since 2018, but a court could take issue with the notion that a recording of him saying those words qualifies as a trademark. In addition, says Asbell, “you probably wouldn’t be able to enforce action against somebody using the timbre of his voice” in an AI replica. “This is a very narrow right. It’s not necessarily going to be able to stop all the AI fakes that come up.”
Matthew McConaughey, right, first delivered his “Alright, alright, alright” catchphrase in 1993’s “Dazed and Confused.”
©GramercyPictures/Courtesy Ever
In July 2025, a New York district court dismissed trademark and copyright claims in a putative class-action lawsuit filed by voice actors against the AI voiceover company Lovo. The court found that even famous celebrities can’t bring trademark claims based on “the use of their likeness as products.” This seems to run counter to McConaughey’s strategy. But McConaughey’s lawyers point out that the plaintiffs in the case had not registered their voice recordings as trademarks. (The court also ruled that the actors’ voices may be protectable if they are used in trademarked sound recordings.)
As is frequently the case with new technologies, laws and legal frameworks haven’t kept pace with the advances of AI. More than 50 copyright cases against AI companies are pending, according to D’Angelo. Those include a lawsuit filed May 5 by five publishers and author Scott Turow accusing Meta of massive trademark infringement of their works to train its AI systems — which alleges CEO Mark Zuckerberg “personally authorized and actively encouraged” the activity. A Meta rep said the company “will fight this lawsuit aggressively” and that “courts have rightly found that training AI on copyrighted material can qualify as fair use.”
And there’s unsettled congressional legislation, the No Fakes Act, that would outlaw unauthorized AI-generated copies of individuals’ voice and likeness. Supporters include tech companies like YouTube, which last year said, “We’re proud to support this important legislation, which tackles the growing problem of harm associated with unauthorized digital replicas: AI-generated content simulating a person’s image or voice that can be used to mislead or misrepresent.” But the bill has faced opposition from free-speech groups. The No Fakes Act would be a “disaster for internet speech and innovation,” according to digital-rights advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, which warns that it would lead to “over-censorship.” The latest version of the bill remains stuck in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The No Fakes Act “would clearly be a big leap” in giving individuals new legal protections at the federal level, Michael Graif, partner in Brown Rudnick’s intellectual property group and trademark, copyright and advertising practice. “The question is whether the harm caused by AI deepfakes is sufficient to warrant such a leap right now,” he says — and whether the proposed law is “at loggerheads with the First Amendment.”
Even with additional legal protections for flesh-and-blood actors, some believe AI-generated performers will one day be the norm in the entertainment business. The use of human actors could become a high-end niche, the equivalent of vinyl records amid the vast ocean of digital music, says JD Harriman, a partner at Foundation Law Group. “I think actors are overestimating the desire for real actors,” he says. “There will be synthetic actors who are ‘good enough’ for the mass of people.”
Harriman recommends that actors license their likeness and voice to AI companies to protect their livelihoods. “Celebrities are losing leverage every day they are not signing an AI deal,” he says. AI-generated movie stars will happen one way or another, Harriman believes. “These companies are going to generate their own AI actors like Tilly Norwood.”
That’s precisely what Tilly Norwood creator Eline Van der Velden, CEO of AI company Particle6, urged actors to do in a Variety op-ed in January. “The question is not whether AI actors will replace actors, it’s whether actors will own their place in this new era — or be left behind,” she wrote. “AI actors, created and owned by performers, are not the enemy of acting. They are its next evolution.”
SAG-AFTRA entered the latest round of studio negotiations with the goal of ensuring that AI actors are paid “on-scale with a member performing in person, making the choice to use a human over AI the smartest financial choice.” The union didn’t win that concession; the studios did agree to the broad principle in favor of human performances but left the door open to use AI-generated actors in certain cases.
McConaughey’s thinking, amid the AI upheaval, is that actors must get as much legal protection for themselves as possible. At the Variety and CNN town hall, he wondered whether the Oscars might add “best AI film” or “best AI actor” categories in the future. (On May 1, the Academy clarified that purely AI actors are ineligible for awards and that screenplays must be human-authored to qualify.)
AI is “going to get so good, we’re not going to know the difference,” he said. “That’s one of the big questions right now: the question of reality. It’s more hazy than ever — in a very exciting way, I think, but also a scary way. Prep for it. Own your own lane, so you at least have agency when it starts to trespass.”
