Technology and AI
Eighty performers want a legal right to own their own voice, and the petition carrying that demand stands at a fifth of the threshold for a written government reply
By Staff Writer | 29 August 2026
A campaign launched on Friday asks the Prime Minister to give every person in the United Kingdom an enforceable property right in their own voice. The parliamentary petition behind it was opened on 6 July and has 2,006 signatures. It needs 10,000 for a written answer from the government and 100,000 before it can be considered for debate.
The campaign is called Save Our Voices Now and around eighty performers have put their names to an open letter to Andy Burnham. Among them are Nicola Coughlan, Hugh Bonneville, Matt Lucas, Luke Evans, Siobhan McSweeney, Jen Brister and Pearl Mackie. What they are asking for is not a code of practice or a consultation. It is a statutory right of ownership, held by every person in the country over the sound of their own voice, on the model of the reforms Denmark is bringing in to give its citizens legal ownership of their face, body and voice with a right to demand removal of unauthorised material and to claim compensation.
The founder of the campaign puts the technical position in one sentence, and it is the sentence that makes the demand hard to dismiss.
In just three seconds, with the right AI system, your voice can be cloned, stolen and reinterpreted without your knowledge.
Peter Caulfield, founder of Save Our Voices Now
The instrument, and where it actually stands
The petition on the parliamentary site is worth opening rather than taking on trust, because the record says something the coverage does not. It is numbered 771831, it is titled Strengthen copyright laws on our voices, and it was created by the same Peter Caulfield. It was published on 6 July, not this week, and it closes on 6 January 2027. When the record was read this morning it carried 2,006 signatures. The first threshold, 10,000, buys nothing more than a written response from the government. The second, 100,000, buys consideration for a debate, which is not the same as a debate.
So eighty well known names are attached to an instrument standing at a fifth of the way to a written reply, six months into a six month window. That is not a criticism of the campaign. It is the measure of the distance between publicity and legislative traction, and it is the reason the letter to the Prime Minister exists alongside the petition rather than instead of it.
There is also a warning in the record for anybody researching this. A separate petition, seeking legal ownership of face, voice and likeness in almost the same terms, closed on 3 June 2026 having reached 8,425 signatures. It is easily mistaken for the live one. It is not the live one.
What the law would have to do
The campaign frames the harm in two directions and they need different remedies. The first is commercial: performers say their recorded voices are being used to generate work they were not engaged for and were not paid for. Copyright, as it stands, protects a particular recording rather than the timbre of a person, which is why the campaign's own petition title reaches for copyright while the open letter reaches for ownership. The second is criminal, and the campaign says 28 per cent of adults in the United Kingdom report having been targeted by a voice cloning scam, a figure that is the campaign's own and should be read as such.
A right in one's own voice would be a new species of property, and drafting it means answering questions the letter does not reach: whether it is assignable, whether it survives death, how it interacts with parody and reporting, and what a person has to prove to establish that a synthesised voice is theirs. The government's answer so far is a promised consultation. Until a Bill exists, the enforceable position in this country remains what it was on Thursday.