Those who play D&D are familiar with the spell Animate Dead. It allows the caster to re-animate the corpse (or bones) of a dead creature and make it serve their will as an undead slave. This sort of necromancy is considered evil and is avoided by good creatures.
While the entertainment industry has yet to recruit true necromancers, they have worked out a form of holographic Animate Dead—the celebrity hologram. With this light necromancy does not raise up the corpse of a dead celebrity, it re-creates their body and makes it dance, sing, and speak at the will of its masters. Tupac Shakur is probably the best known victim of this dark art of light (though it was not exactly a hologram) and he might soon be joined by Amy Winehouse. As might be imagined, these holograms can create strong emotional responses with some people seeing them as desecrating the memory of the dead. There are also spiderwebs of legality entangling the creation and use of such holograms. Fortunately, I can leave the legal wrangling to those who are paid for that task. I will focus on the ethics of the matter.
One relevant factor in assessing the ethics of this matter is how the holograms are used and what they are made to do. Consider, for example, the holographic Amy Winehouse. If the hologram is used to only re-create a concert she recorded, then this would seem to morally on par with showing a video of the original concert. While the hologram would be a change, it would seem to be analogous to remastering the original video in HD or creating a VR version of the concert from original digital recordings. That is, it is merely a modification of the medium. As such, using a hologram in this manner would seem to be morally unproblematic. If the use of the hologram goes beyond merely recreating past performances, then the morality can become more complicated.
One matter of concern is the ethics of making the hologram perform new shows, say new things and perform in new ways. That is, the hologram is not merely re-enacting what the original did in a way analogous to a recording but being used to create new performances using the image of a dead person. This is of special concern if the hologram is made to perform with other performers (living or dead), to perform at specific venues (such as a white nationalist event), or to endorse or condemn products, ideas or people.
If, prior to death, the celebrity worked out a contract specifying how their hologram would be used, then this would lay to rest the general moral concern about this matter. After all, the use would be with the permission of the person and would be no more problematic than if they did those actions while alive. If holograms become a thing, presumably such contracts will become common.
If, as is most likely, the celebrity did not specify how their hologram should be used, then there would potentially be moral problems. To illustrate, a celebrity might have been against this use of holograms (as Prince was), a celebrity might have disliked the other performers that their image is now forced to sing and dance with, or a celebrity might have loathed a product, idea or people that their light corpse is being forced to endorse. One approach to this matter is to use the guideline of legal ownership of the rights to the celebrity’s works and likeness.
When a celebrity dies, the legal rights to their works and likeness goes to whoever is legally specified to receive them. This person or business then has the right to exploit the works and likeness for their gain. For example, Disney can keep making money off the Star Wars films featuring Carrie Fisher—though she died in 2016. On this view, the likeness of a celebrity is a commodity that can be owned (and thus bought and sold). While the celebrity can disagree with the usage of their likeness while alive, after death their likeness is controlled by the owner who can use it as they wish within the limits of property rights. This assumes that the celebrity did not set usage restrictions while alive. This usage is analogous to the use of any property whose ownership is inherited and it can be thus contended that there should be no special moral exception that forbids monetizing a dead celebrity’s likeness by the owner of that likeness. That said, the next essay in the series will explore reasons as to why the likeness of a celebrity is different in morally relevant ways from other commodities.
I think that what you are discussing here is pretty easy – it’s all about contracts and agreement. Paul McCartney, for example, has only recently had success in obtaining the rights to the Beatles catalog of music, after years and years of legal battles with Michael Jackson and their respective companies.
There are sports-themed games that use the likenesses of current and past players to add some realism to the gameplay. Sports figures have their heads scanned and placed on realistic animated 3D bodies, and it creates a tidy little revenue stream for them.
With all issues of rights, it comes down to “My lawyer can beat up your lawyer”. We can sit in judgement and say that Michael Jackson should never, ever have had the rights to the Beatles songs, and all that money should have gone to Lennon & McCartney or Apple Records or Yoko Ono – but the contract was signed and our own sense of ethics and right & wrong don’t really enter into it.
So some notable sports figure can enter into a contract for the use of his image, and might get some money from it but lose a certain amount of control over how it is used. If he has a serious objection to it, he can sue.
Beyond contractual licensing and trademarking, and somewhere in between that and “Public Domain” comes the idea of “Fair Use” – which is a very gray area revolving around the transformative, educational, non-competitive use of someone else’s creative work. Tough to define.
One notable example of this issue is in “Gaylord vs US”. Frank Gaylord, a sculptor, had created a sculpture called “The Column” as the center of the Korean War Memorial in Washington, DC. An amateur photographer, John Alli, photographed this sculpture at the dedication of the memorial, or shortly thereafter.
The US Postal Service bought the photograph from Alli, and used it on a commemorative stamp – and Gaylord sued. Was the photograph “derivative” enough so that the postal service owed Gaylord nothing? Or was Gaylord entitled to some of the profits from the sale of the stamp?
Another recent case was with regard to an image of Barack Obama used in a poster called “HOPE”, designed by Shepard Fairey, which became an iconic symbol of the 2008 presidential campaign. The poster was based on a photograph taken by a freelance photographer, Mannie Garcia. Who owns the rights to the image? Did Fairey’s poster design deviate enough from the photograph to qualify as original artwork?
Further, while the dreamy, “off in the distance” look in Obama’s eyes was representative of the 2008 campaign, the poster could easily have been used in a negative context – bearing a strong similarity in concept and impact to posters of Che Guevara and Josef Stalin, this image could easily have been used by anti-Obama activists to completely undermine and co-opt the intended message.
Even this is small change in the ethics department.
What is truly a moral and ethical challenge is the developing ability to map a person’s facial expressions and mouth movements, and alter speech by adding, subtracting, substituting, and re-ordering text in such a way as to make a legitimate speech say something totally different – and even as a new, cutting-edge technology, the results are nearly seamless.
At the ACM-SIGGRAPH International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in July, 2017, Supasorn Suwajanakorn, Steven M. Seitz, and Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman presented a paper titled “Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio”, which presents some frightening possibilities in the area of “Fake News”. Given the way the public eschews critical thinking, refuses to read “below the fold”, and has a demonstrated susceptibility to consume whatever is presented by their “tribe”, the idea of fighting over contracts and likenesses of dead celebrities seems like pretty tame stuff.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Yq67CjDqvw&w=560&h=315%5D
While these researchers have limited their scope to the CGI capabilities of facial matching and “cleanup” (using a synthetic 3D representation of Obama, where the lighting, background, incidental head movement, and expression can all be simulated), others have been experimenting with the capture of voice patterns, and have managed a high degree of success in using a persons own voice, broken up and reconnected to read text that that person never, ever said, while approaching the same near-seamless video representation that Suwajanakorn, et al, have achieved.
The global political ramifications of this are boundles, especially for an already morally-bankrupt population.
https://www.youtube[dot]com/watch?time_continue=44&v=ohmajJTcpNk
I think that what you are discussing here is pretty easy – it’s all about contracts and agreement. Paul McCartney, for example, has only recently had success in obtaining the rights to the Beatles catalog of music, after years and years of legal battles with Michael Jackson and their respective companies.
There are sports-themed games that use the likenesses of current and past players to add some realism to the gameplay. Sports figures have their heads scanned and placed on realistic animated 3D bodies, and it creates a tidy little revenue stream for them.
With all issues of rights, it comes down to “My lawyer can beat up your lawyer”. We can sit in judgement and say that Michael Jackson should never, ever have had the rights to the Beatles songs, and all that money should have gone to Lennon & McCartney or Apple Records or Yoko Ono – but the contract was signed and our own sense of ethics and right & wrong don’t really enter into it.
So some notable sports figure can enter into a contract for the use of his image, and might get some money from it but lose a certain amount of control over how it is used. If he has a serious objection to it, he can sue.
Beyond contractual licensing and trademarking, and somewhere in between that and “Public Domain” comes the idea of “Fair Use” – which is a very gray area revolving around the transformative, educational, non-competitive use of someone else’s creative work. Tough to define.
One notable example of this issue is in “Gaylord vs US”. Frank Gaylord, a sculptor, had created a sculpture called “The Column” as the center of the Korean War Memorial in Washington, DC. An amateur photographer, John Alli, photographed this sculpture at the dedication of the memorial, or shortly thereafter.
The US Postal Service bought the photograph from Alli, and used it on a commemorative stamp – and Gaylord sued. Was the photograph “derivative” enough so that the postal service owed Gaylord nothing? Or was Gaylord entitled to some of the profits from the sale of the stamp?
Another recent case was with regard to an image of Barack Obama used in a poster called “HOPE”, designed by Shepard Fairey, which became an iconic symbol of the 2008 presidential campaign. The poster was based on a photograph taken by a freelance photographer, Mannie Garcia. Who owns the rights to the image? Did Fairey’s poster design deviate enough from the photograph to qualify as original artwork?
Further, while the dreamy, “off in the distance” look in Obama’s eyes was representative of the 2008 campaign, the poster could easily have been used in a negative context – bearing a strong similarity in concept and impact to posters of Che Guevara and Josef Stalin, this image could easily have been used by anti-Obama activists to completely undermine and co-opt the intended message.
Even this is small change in the ethics department.
What is truly a moral and ethical challenge is the developing ability to map a person’s facial expressions and mouth movements, and alter speech by adding, subtracting, substituting, and re-ordering text in such a way as to make a legitimate speech say something totally different – and even as a new, cutting-edge technology, the results are nearly seamless.
At the ACM-SIGGRAPH International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in July, 2017, Supasorn Suwajanakorn, Steven M. Seitz, and Ira Kemelmacher-Shlizerman presented a paper titled “Synthesizing Obama: Learning Lip Sync from Audio”, which presents some frightening possibilities in the area of “Fake News”. Given the way the public eschews critical thinking, refuses to read “below the fold”, and has a demonstrated susceptibility to consume whatever is presented by their “tribe”, the idea of fighting over contracts and likenesses of dead celebrities seems like pretty tame stuff.
youtube [dot] com/watch?v=9Yq67CjDqvw
While these researchers have limited their scope to the CGI capabilities of facial matching and “cleanup” (using a synthetic 3D representation of Obama, where the lighting, background, incidental head movement, and expression can all be simulated), others have been experimenting with the capture of voice patterns, and have managed a high degree of success in using a persons own voice, broken up and reconnected to read text that that person never, ever said, while approaching the same near-seamless video representation that Suwajanakorn, et al, have achieved.
The global political ramifications of this are boundles, especially for an already morally-bankrupt population.
youtube [dot] com/watch?time_continue=44&v=ohmajJTcpNk
arxiv [dot] org/pdf/1805.09488.pdf