A lawsuit against James Cameron underscores questions over actors’ likenesses

While the “Avatar” movie series remains one of director James Cameron’s most celebrated works, a new lawsuit revolving around the first film could have widespread implications. The lawsuit, which accuses Cameron of using a performer’s image without permission, comes amid concerns about the legal ownership of actors’ faces.

‘Without credit or compensation’

The actor Q’orianka Kilcher filed a lawsuit alleging that in 2005, when she was 14, Cameron “extracted her facial features” from a movie about Pocahontas called “The New World” then “directed his design team to use it as the foundation for the character of Neytiri” in 2009’s “Avatar,” said a release about the suit, per NBC News. Kilcher’s face was supposedly “captured in production sketches, sculpted into maquettes and laser-scanned into high-resolution digital models, then distributed across multiple visual effects vendors to render Neytiri’s final appearance.”

Kilcher’s face as Neytiri “went on to appear in the films, on movie posters and on merchandise, without her knowledge or consent,” the release said. Kilcher is of Native Peruvian heritage, and the case “exposes how one of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers” used Kilcher’s “cultural heritage to create a record-breaking film franchise — without credit or compensation to her — through a series of deliberate, non-expressive commercial acts,” the lawsuit said.

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‘In the age of AI, our likeness is no longer safe’

The lawsuit raises broad concerns about who truly owns actors’ likenesses: the actors themselves or the studios they work for. It is possible that lawyers for Cameron and Disney “will be able to make some kind of fair use argument here, claiming that Neytiri is enough of a transformation of Kilcher’s original appearance as to be cleared of any of her claims,” said the AV Club.

This case revolves around a “complex area of the law that has taken on a new immediacy in the age of generative AI, an emerging technology that allows anyone with an internet connection to easily create images that replicate existing art, photographs and human likenesses,” said The New York Times. Laws attempt to balance First Amendment rights by “distinguishing between commercial exploitation” and artistic works. But “there is not always a bright line,” Jennifer E. Rothman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said to the Times.

The lawsuit “reflects a core fear among Hollywood performers in the artificial intelligence age: losing control of their own faces,” said the Times. And such a problem could seep into the general public as well. New pushes against AI are “less about the technology than who owns your image, voice and likeness,” said Forbes. The “fight over AI has entered a harder phase, one measured in licensing fees, fraud claims, takedown demands and liability.” Celebrities are simply an “early test case,” as the law must now reckon with a question “it did not have to answer at this scale before: When does a digital version of a person become something that person can control?”

As the debate over likeness usage rages, actors like Kilcher are standing up for themselves. “In the age of AI, our likeness is no longer safe,” Kilcher told the Times. “While what happened to me is personal, it’s also a big warning that, if we don’t act now, this type of thing will become standard. This case is about the future of identity.”