This isn’t the first time we have commended Taylor Swift over here on the Helpline, after all, who doesn’t love a bit of Tay Tay? This story broke on the back of a tweet from a US trademark lawyer.
Josh Gerben, who has spent years quietly flagging celebrity USPTO filings before the rest of the press catches up, posted that TAS Rights Management, LLC, the company that holds Taylor Swift’s intellectual property, had filed three trademark applications in late April. Two of them were for her actual voice. The third was for her image, performing on stage with a pink guitar, sequined bodysuit, mid-Eras Tour.
We see a lot of celebrity trademark filings come through. This one is genuinely different.
And whilst the immediate headlines are predictably “Taylor Swift fights back against AI”, the more useful question for our readers is the quieter one underneath. If one of the most-protected, most-lawyered brands on the planet thinks her name and reputation aren’t enough anymore, and that she needs to lock down the sound of her voice as a registered trademark, what does that tell us about the dark direction the creative world is drifting towards?
What actually happened
On 24 April 2026, TAS Rights Management filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The first two are sound marks, registrations of a specific noise rather than a word or a logo. One is the spoken phrase “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” (USPTO Serial No. 99784980). The other is the shorter “Hey, it’s Taylor” (Serial No. 99784979). Both filings include audio clips of her actually saying the phrases, in her own voice.
The third application covers a specific photograph from the Eras Tour, Swift in a sequined bodysuit, holding a pink guitar. All three were filed in Class 41, which covers entertainment and information services.
Don’t take our word for it, you can confirm any of this yourself on the USPTO’s Trademark Status & Document Retrieval system by typing in the serial numbers.
This is not the first time a celebrity has done something like this. The actor Matthew McConaughey filed a similar suite of trademarks earlier this year covering elements of his voice and image. But Swift is, commercially, in a different league. When she moves, the rest of the entertainment industry tends to follow, and the IP world is watching closely.
Why are celebrities looking for more things to trademark?
I don’t believe it’s all about AI deepfakes and a purely defensive play. Yes, trademarks do help you enforce your rights, and an unambiguous, clearly-defined trademark will make enforcing them much easier and cheaper, especially when it comes to taking down social media accounts, posts and domain names.
Whilst over the past two years, Swift has been at the sharp end of synthetic media in a way very few public figures have. Non-consensual sexual deepfakes of her went viral. Fake clips of her endorsing cookware brands tricked her own fans. Manipulated political endorsements were shared widely on social media. None of it was real, and none of it was something her existing rights could easily stop on their own.
“Right-of-publicity law” in the US, the legal doctrine that protects a person’s name, image and voice from commercial misuse, is patchy and varies state to state. Copyright doesn’t always help, because an AI-generated soundalike isn’t, strictly, a copy of any one recording. Defamation requires you to prove a false statement of fact, which a fake image often dodges.
A registered trademark is a different animal. Once you own it, you can challenge anything that creates a likelihood of confusion with your mark, and that includes imitations that are merely “confusingly similar”, not identical. For Swift, that potentially gives her a route to act against AI clones that sound like her even when they aren’t her.
Whether the USPTO will actually grant a registration over a celebrity’s spoken phrase remains to be seen. This hasn’t really been tested in court. It is, in plain terms, a novel use of an old tool.
But the strategy is the strategy. And the strategy is what brand owners in the UK and overseas should care about because there is another angle here that people may be missing.
Trademarks often become incredibly valuable assets!
What if there is another reason behind this other than defence and enforcement? The music industry in particular isn’t what it once was. Online streaming services like Spotify nullified a lot of the income whilst also boosting the celebrity. This is just an opinion, but I can’t help but think about James Earl Jones, who voiced Darth Vader, selling the rights to his voice to Lucasfilm.
I get sick of everybody talking about trademarks like insurance, or necessity. Trademarks are an asset. You are creating legally documented Intellectual Property. If you have a globally recognised voice, picture, tagline or phrase, whatever it is, you lock it down. Because one day in the not too distant future, we won’t need Taylor Swift to sing, in order to hear Taylor Swift. It breaks my heart to say this (as a musician) but we probably won’t need Neil Young to write and perform a Neil Young song. The IP is what now matters, and in the US in particular, the sharp people are watching the tides change and recognising what they have that cannot be replicated, and overall, that is brand recognition.
And that’s a trademark. What’s being spun as a necessary inconvenience is actually a very smart commercial play. Because if you don’t own it, one day you may struggle to sell it.
Why this matters beyond the celebrity
A useful way to think about this: Taylor Swift’s voice is her brand.
I posted a video a while ago about Cole Palmer (footballer) trademarking his face and rumour has it Luke Littler (darts player), is doing the same. Sports stars are recognising their celebrity status and the savvy ones making sure they lock the legal ownership of their celebrity brand down.
Now ask yourself, what’s your brand? For a lot of our clients, the answer involves a personal name. A face on a website. A logo. A tagline. For some of them, it also involves a voice. We have clients who present podcasts, who narrate their own ads, who do video courses, who built a following on TikTok by talking to the camera. For them, “the way I sound” is genuinely part of “what people are buying”.
Six months ago, that was a marketing observation. Today, it’s a legal exposure.
AI voice-cloning tools that need only a few seconds of source audio are freely available. So are image generators that can produce a photorealistic version of anyone whose face is on a website. We are not theorising about this. We have spoken to UK businesses who have already had their founder’s voice cloned to push crypto scams, and small product brands whose customer-facing presenter has been deepfaked into endorsing things she has never heard of.
Trademark law won’t solve all of that. But it gives you a far better foothold than the existing UK personality-rights regime, which is honestly quite thin compared to the US.
What this means for your brand
The bigger lesson is this. If your voice, face or distinctive style is part of what you sell, trademarks belong in your protection plan, not just copyright and contracts.
That’s true whether you are a sole trader podcaster or a multi-national. The questions you should be asking are practical, not theoretical:
- Is there a specific phrase or jingle you use on every ad or video that customers now associate with you?
- Is there a visual that recurs, a particular pose, set, costume, or animation, that has become a recognisable shorthand for your brand?
- Is your founder’s name doing serious commercial work, or is the trading name doing it?
- If somebody released a slightly-different version of any of those things tomorrow, would your customers be confused?
Where the answer to any of those is “yes”, a trademark conversation may be long overdue.
What to do if you’re in a similar situation
Firstly, start thinking about trademarks as a valuable asset you may one day hope to sell, and not an inconvenient cost to protect what you have today. Then:
- Audit what you actually use commercially. Most brand owners we work with have at least three or four assets that function as trademarks in the real world without ever having been registered. Make a list before you do anything else.
- Run a free search on the existing register. Our free trademark search tool will tell you, in plain English, whether your asset is clear to file in the UK.
- File the right marks in the right classes. Voice and image marks are technically possible but procedurally fiddly. Word marks, logos and slogans are far quicker wins and usually the ones to start with.
- Set up monitoring. A registered trademark is only as useful as your willingness to act on it. Our monitoring service flags potential conflicts and impersonations as they appear, including on social media.
Sidebar: the US is starting to enforce. The UK isn’t there yet.
The day after Swift’s filings made headline news again, the US Department of Justice announced its first criminal arrests under the Take It Down Act, the 2025 US federal law that makes it a crime to publish non-consensual AI deepfakes.
Two men, in New York and Texas, were charged on 21 May with publishing thousands of deepfake images, some of named celebrities, some of ordinary women. Each faces up to two years in prison. Platforms hosting that material must take it down within 48 hours of being notified.
Britain doesn’t have a single equivalent statute. Pieces of the picture exist – the Online Safety Act, defamation, intentional disclosure offences – but a clean federal-style law is still a work in progress. Trademark filings, in the meantime, are one of the most usable private-law tools UK brand owners actually have. That’s not an accident. It’s part of why we’re talking about Taylor Swift on a trademark blog.
How TMH can help
We have been helping UK businesses register and protect trademarks for nearly two decades, and the conversations have changed a great deal in the past 18 months. More clients now arrive with AI on their minds – what to do if somebody deepfakes their founder, how to protect a recognisable presenter’s voice, whether their existing word mark covers enough.
If that sounds like you, book a free 15-minute call with one of our team. We’ll talk plainly about what you have, what you don’t, and what would actually be useful to file. You can also email us at enquiries@thetrademarkhelpline.com or ring the office on 0161 833 5400.
You can also use our free trademark search before any of that to get a quick sense of where you stand.
