California law now covers a dead performer's digital replica

What the amended statute documents

California's Civil Code section 3344.1 gives a deceased person's estate a property right in that person's name, voice, signature, photograph or likeness, provided the identity had commercial value at death. The right runs for 70 years after death and lets an estate sue for unauthorised commercial use, with statutory damages of at least $750 plus any profits. Assembly Bill 1836, signed 17 September 2024 and effective from 1 January 2025, added a distinct category: a digital replica, defined as a computer-generated, highly realistic representation of a person's voice or visual likeness in an expressive audiovisual work or sound recording, where the person did not actually perform or their performance was materially altered. Producing, distributing or making available such a replica without consent now carries damages of at least $10,000 or actual damages, whichever is greater.

Why the licence sits above the display technology

The statute is indifferent to how a replica is shown. A production could route a licensed voice model and a captured likeness through a Pepper's ghost foil rig, an LED volume, or a fully rendered CG character, and the legal question is the same each time: has the estate consented. That separation matters for anyone assessing a hologram-style tour of a deceased performer. The optical mechanism, whatever it is, tells an audience nothing about whether the performance is authorised. A licence agreement is a contractual fact, not a visible property of the image, and a venue programme rarely states which mechanism was used or who signed the release. Readers should treat the rights question and the mechanism question as separate lines of evidence.

What the text does and does not settle

The exceptions are specific: news, public affairs and sports broadcasts; plays, books, films and similar works unless they directly advertise a product; comment, criticism, scholarship, satire or parody; and historical or biographical representations, plus fleeting digital-replica uses. The statute does not require a public registry of licences, so an outside observer cannot verify from the display alone whether a production holds one. Nor does it define how much alteration turns a real performance into a digital replica at the margins, a line likely to be tested first in recording and film rather than live venues. The 2024 amendment closes a gap the base statute left open since 1985, when synthetic voice and motion technology did not exist, but it does not retroactively confirm the status of estate-hologram productions staged before it took effect.

• Who is the licensor for this performance's voice and image, and is that party the recorded rights holder?
• Does the marketing describe the display as an unqualified hologram, and if so, what optical mechanism actually produces the image?
• Would this use fall under an exception, such as a documentary or historical representation, that changes the licensing requirement?

A California statute is only binding within reach of California law and does not itself certify a mechanism as a hologram in the optical sense; it governs consent to reproduce a person's identity, a separate and prior question from how convincingly that identity is displayed.