CONSENT, NOW STARRING HOLLYWOOD: Telecom Wrote This Playbook, Hollywood’s Just Reading It

I have spent a good chunk of my career sitting on a few very different sides of a similar table. These days I defend companies against TCPA and CIPA claims, where the entire fight usually comes down to one question, did this person actually agree to be contacted or recorded this way. Before that, I worked in entertainment transactions, negotiating talent deals where the entire fight usually came down to one question, did this person actually agree to have their name, face, voice, or general likeness used this way. Turns out those questions are basically the same question wearing different outfits, and this past month made that impossible to ignore.

Start with California for example. Governor Newsom signed SB 1050 this week at SAG AFTRA Plaza in Los Angeles, and if you strip away the Hollywood backdrop, it reads almost exactly like a consumer protection statute out of the telecom world. Advertisers now have to disclose when a performer in a commercial is synthetic rather than a real human being, and regulators can yank ads that skip the disclosure. Newsom noted himself that Californians deserve to know when the thing selling them a product is not a person at all. Swap out “selling them a product” for “calling their cell phone” or “recording this conversation” and you have basically restated the entire rationale behind both the TCPA and CIPA.

SAG AFTRA helped draft the actual bill language with state Sen. Angelique Ashby, which is smart, because anyone who has negotiated a talent contract knows the difference between a rule that sounds good and a rule that actually works usually lives in the fine print. New York beat California to this particular punch, signing a nearly identical disclosure law back in December that took effect this past June. The two major entertainment hubs both landing on the same fix within a year is significant. If you have watched consent and disclosure laws spread state by state in the telecom and privacy world, this pattern should feel very familiar.

Furthermore, just a couple months earlier, SAG AFTRA members ratified a new four year contract with the major studios, passing with over 91 percent approval, and tucked inside it is language limiting when a studio can swap in an AI performer instead of hiring a real actor. The standard, and I promise this is a direct quote and not me trying to be cute, is that the synthetic has to bring “significant additional value” over the real actor or that actor’s own digital double. Having sat in rooms negotiating likeness and consent clauses for actual human talent, I can tell you that phrase is going to get litigated, argued over, and stretched in every direction imaginable the second a studio wants to save money on a background actor or a stunt double.

Some union members are already saying the guardrail has more bark than bite, and they are not wrong to worry. The union cannot strike over an AI dispute until 2030, so any fight over what counts as “significant additional value” gets routed into arbitration instead. Anyone who works in compliance knows exactly how this story goes. A rule looks airtight on the page and then real world enforcement turns out to be the actual battle.

Additionally, one of the major talent agencies, Creative Artists Agency, has been pushing Meta hard to build real guardrails into Muse, its AI tool that can generate images from someone’s public social media photos. CAA’s position is clean and simple, nobody’s name, voice, image, or creative work should be usable by an AI model without clear consent from that actual person. Meta’s answer leans on opt out settings, point out that private accounts and minors are automatically excluded and public account holders can opt out if they take the time to find the setting. Read that closely and you will recognize a framework I deal with constantly on the defense side, and it is not nearly as one sided as critics make it sound. Opt out regimes exist because they scale. A platform processing billions of photos cannot realistically obtain individualized upfront consent for every possible use case before anything happens, any more than every business calling or texting its own customer base could get a fresh signed consent form before every single contact. Built in exclusions for private accounts and minors, plus a real and findable opt out, are the same kind of reasonable, documented compliance structure that regulators and courts have accepted in plenty of TCPA and CIPA contexts, especially where the company can show it gave meaningful notice and an easy way to say no. The consent up front model sounds cleaner in a press statement, but is often the model that is hardest to implement at a meaningful scale without grinding a product to a halt.

None of these three things fixes the whole picture by itself. The California and New York laws only reach advertising. The union contract only reaches union productions. The CAA and Meta fight only reaches what happens once your face and voice are already floating around online. But line them up side by side and the direction is obvious. Whether we are talking about a phone number, a recorded call, a face, or a voice, the industry keeps circling back to the same two questions that have defined my entire career on both sides of this. Did the person actually say yes, and do they even know this is happening to them. Hollywood is just now catching up to a conversation telecom and privacy lawyers have been having for years, and honestly, it is about time.

Talk to you soon TCPAWorld and as always, be safe.