Tokyo court dismisses Kenjiro Tsuda's TikTok claim but recognises voice under publicity rights

The Tokyo District Court dismissed voice actor Kenjiro Tsuda's lawsuit against TikTok on 30 September 2026. Tsuda had sought removal of more than 180 videos using AI-generated narration that mimicked his voice, alleging violations of Japan's Unfair Competition Prevention Act and infringement of his publicity rights. The videos were reported to have generated roughly $3,000 to $4,700 per month in revenue.

The dismissal was on procedural grounds: the videos had already been deleted from the platform and were no longer archived on its servers. TikTok had argued the voice was generic, and that the uploader disclosed the narration used AI trained on the voice of a friend.

Despite the dismissal, the ruling established that a person's voice is subject to protection under publicity rights laws. Reporting on the decision describes this as the first time a Japanese court has recognised voice-related rights, in a jurisdiction that previously had no direct legal protection for voice and no prior ruling finding infringement.

Why it matters for digital humans: A loss on the facts that creates the right on the law is still the more durable outcome. Japan has a large, organised voice-acting profession and, until now, no doctrinal hook for it; synthetic voice vendors operating there have been able to treat voice as unowned. That assumption is now unsafe, even though this particular claimant recovered nothing. Worth watching whether the reasoning holds on appeal or in the next case, since a dismissal on procedural grounds gives the publicity-rights statement less weight than a decision that turned on it.