IP Law Daily, PUBLICITY RIGHTS—N.D. Cal.: Federal court sends NPR host's AI voice lawsuit back to state court, finding claims target output not input, (Jul 24, 2026)

By Wendy Biddle, J.D.

Claims centered on the imitation of a person's voice fall outside the subject matter of copyright, even when artificial intelligence is the alleged imitator.

A federal district court in the Northern District of California ordered the remand of a lawsuit brought by NPR radio host David Greene against Google LLC and Alphabet Inc., holding that Greene's state law claims are not preempted by the Copyright Act because they are fundamentally about the unauthorized use of his voice, an output of Google's AI system, rather than about the copying of his sound recordings as an input to that system (Greene v. Google LLC, No. 3:26-cv-01773-CRB (N.D. Cal. Jul. 23, 2026)).

Background. David Greene is a well-known radio and podcast personality who hosted several National Public Radio programs and whose voice, according to his complaint, reaches millions of listeners. Google released the first version of NotebookLM in July 2023. NotebookLM is an AI podcasting product that allows users to upload content and receive an automatically generated podcast narrated by AI audio hosts. The product was praised both for its utility as a personal information synthesizer and for the naturalistic, conversational quality of its AI voices.

Greene alleges that he has no business relationship with Google or NotebookLM, but learned from journalists and users of the product that Google was using his voice. Specifically, Greene claims that the default male AI host in NotebookLM, a voice he refers to as "Charlie", exhibits the same sound, tone, cadence, and mannerisms as his own voice. He alleges that Google used his voice without authorization and that his decades-long career provided datasets that trained Google's voice model. Greene also alleged that regardless of the precise technical means used, Google deliberately engineered "Charlie" to sound so substantially similar to his voice that ordinary listeners would reasonably believe the voice to be his.

Greene filed suit in California state court on January 23, 2026, raising four state law causes of action: a statutory right of publicity claim under California Civil Code § 3344, an unfair competition claim under California Business and Professions Code § 17200, a common law right of publicity claim, and a quasi-contract/unjust enrichment claim. All four claims center on Google's alleged misappropriation of his voice, likeness, and identity.

Google removed the case to federal court on March 2, 2026, arguing that Greene's claims were preempted by the Copyright Act because they were premised on the copying of Greene's sound recordings. Google also filed a motion to dismiss, which the court did not reach given its remand ruling. Greene moved to remand, arguing his claims were outside the scope of copyright.

Preemption framework. Copyright preemption in the Ninth Circuit requires a two-part showing. A defendant seeking to keep a case in federal court on preemption grounds must demonstrate, first, that the subject matter of the state law claim falls within the subject matter of copyright as defined in 17 U.S.C. §§ 102 and 103, and second, that the rights asserted under state law are equivalent to the exclusive rights of copyright holders under 17 U.S.C. § 106. A claim must satisfy both elements for preemption to apply.

The court noted that the Ninth Circuit strictly construes the removal statute against removal jurisdiction, and that the strong presumption against removal means defendants bear the burden of establishing that removal is proper, with all ambiguity resolved in favor of remand.

Copyright subject matter. The court focused its analysis on the first element of the preemption test and found that Google failed to carry its jurisdictional burden. The court drew a critical distinction that ran through the entire opinion: the difference between the inputs to Google's AI system and its outputs.

Google argued that the essence of Greene's claims was that Google copied recordings of his radio and podcast episodes to create a competing product, placing the focus on the act of copying copyrightable sound recordings. The court rejected that characterization. Reviewing each of Greene's four causes of action, the court found that all of them are premised not on the act of copying, but on the use of his voice, likeness, and identity in the resulting AI product. The statutory right of publicity claim rested on Google using his voice and likeness to its commercial benefit. The UCL claim was based on Google's failure to disclose that NotebookLM's male AI host was engineered to imitate his voice. The common law right of publicity claim focused on Google's exploitation of a core attribute of his identity. And the unjust enrichment claim targeted the commercial value Google derived from his distinctive voice and persona.

In the court's framing, copying served merely as the mechanism by which Google carried out the misappropriation, not as the actionable wrong itself. That distinction placed Greene's claims outside copyright's reach because a person's voice, likeness, and identity are not copyrightable. The court cited established Ninth Circuit precedent confirming that voice is not copyrightable and that names and likenesses are similarly beyond copyright's scope.

The court also addressed Google's argument that copyright preemption applies when the entirety of an allegedly misappropriated vocal performance is contained within a copyrighted medium. The court found that principle inapplicable here. Because a voice, as distinguished from a particular vocal performance, is not "fixed;" no medium can contain the entirety of it. The cases in which preemption swallowed voice-related claims involved situations where the only exploitation occurred through reproduction of copyrightable material, such as distributing a film performance or sampling a recorded song. Greene's claims, by contrast, revolved around the allegation that NotebookLM's voice is substantially similar to his own; an imitation claim, not a reproduction claim.

The court found the Ninth Circuit's decision in Midler v. Ford Motor Co., 849 F.2d 460 (9th Cir. 1988) directly controlling. In Midler, a defendant held a license to a song but hired a "sound alike" to imitate the artist's voice rather than using the original recording. The Ninth Circuit held that one's voice is more personal than any work of authorship and is therefore outside the subject matter of copyright, and that mere imitation of a recorded performance, even a deliberate and exact simulation, does not constitute copyright infringement.

The court rejected Google's attempt to distinguish Midler on the ground that it involved human mimicry rather than AI. The court found that Midler's holding is grounded in the nature of voice imitation generally, not in the identity of the imitator. Greene's voice imitation claims, the court concluded, are analytically indistinguishable from those in Midler, just with AI standing in the role of the voice actor.

Because Google failed to satisfy the first element of the copyright preemption test, the court did not reach the second element regarding equivalence of rights, and ordered the case remanded to California state court.

The Case is No. 3:26-cv-01773-CRB.

Judge: Breyer, C.

Attorneys: Mark C. Mao (Boies Schiller Flexner LLP) for David L. Greene. Eleanor Frances Brock (Keker, Van Nest & Peters LLP) for Google LLC.

Companies: Google LLC

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