Josh Gerben Answers NYT Dealbook’s Questions About Taylor Swift’s New Trademark Filings

Taylor Swift recently filed three trademarks in attempt to protect herself from AI generated content.

The New York Times Dealbook discussed the new legal strategy with trademark attorney Josh Gerben. 

How do these trademarks potentially help in a case over deepfakes?
“One potential defense is right to publicity law, which basically says, I can’t put Taylor Swift’s image on a T-shirt and go sell it, because that would violate her right to exploit her name, image and likeness. If I were to take her voice and make a new song, I’m arguably violating her right to publicity.

But courts haven’t really looked at this yet. So we’re not sure how they would view it.

Now you’re also trying to trademark the voice to have another cause of action, where you could say, by using my voice, you’re also violating my trademark rights.”

Is there something about trademark law that makes it particularly useful in this context?
“Trademark law gives you the ability to police against anything that’s confusingly similar. So it doesn’t even have to be an identical copy, or it doesn’t have to actually be Taylor or her voice. It could just be something that’s similar to that. So it’s arguably a little bit of broader protection.”

Why haven’t we seen a big lawsuit over celebrity deepfakes yet?
“It looks like everybody’s kind of setting up. You’re going to be testing novel legal theories and you want to make sure that if you’re actually going to spend the time and money to litigate it, that you have a really good chance of setting a good precedent.

Because the last thing you want to do is lose and set a bad precedent, where then it just becomes kind of open season on your intellectual property.”

Are your clients worried about this?
“Even brand owners are starting to pay attention, because you could use A.I. to create fake advertisements that say something that’s untrue or derogatory about a brand.”

Source: Southall, Ashley and Sarah Kessler. https://www.nytimes.com/. “Dealbook: Taylor Swift’s deepfake defense”. 2 May 2026.