In 1985 the advertising agency Young & Rubicam asked Bette Midler to sing "Do You Want to Dance" for a Ford commercial. She declined, so the agency hired one of her former backup singers and told her to sound as much like Midler as she could. In Midler v. Ford Motor Co., 849 F.2d 460 (1988), the Ninth Circuit held that deliberately imitating a widely known singer's distinctive voice to sell a product was actionable under California law. That case had three features: a human imitator, a commercial, and a celebrity whose voice the public would recognize in the copy.
On 6 November 2026 the estate business of the most imitated voice in popular music filed a case that changes the imitator and the setting. There is no advertisement, the imitator is software, and the alleged copies are made on request by anyone with an account. Billboard reported that Elvis Presley Enterprises has sued Suno, the leading AI music company, for copyright infringement and for breaching Presley's likeness rights by "stealing his voice."
Practical takeaway. Tennessee's ELVIS Act creates two routes to liability for AI voice copies: making an unauthorized voice available to the public, and supplying a tool whose primary purpose or function is producing a particular person's voice. Suno's defense, as stated to Billboard, speaks to the second route. The complaint's videos and its allegation about name prompts speak to both, and to what Suno knew.
What Elvis Presley Enterprises and Eight Mile Style filed against Suno on Friday, 6 November 2026
Elvis Presley Enterprises is a unit of Authentic Brands Group and controls the intellectual property tied to Presley, including much of his song catalog and the rights to his name, image and likeness. The complaint was filed by Richard Busch, a music litigator at Adams and Reese. Billboard quotes it as saying that "all of the humanity, history, despair, and triumph that constitutes Elvis' identity was stolen and is stored on servers," and that Suno acted "intentionally, maliciously, and fraudulently."
The voice allegations are specific. The complaint describes Presley's "distinctively rich vocal timbre, with a warm velvety resonance and perfectly employed vibrato," links a folder of videos of Suno outputs, and calls Suno's statements in other cases that its models block artist-name prompts "unequivocally false." According to Billboard, it alleges that as recently as October Suno produced an Elvis clone from lyrics that included his name, and that entering a musician's name into Suno's "Create" function generates output that reproduces "the signature and recognizable aspects of his distinguished voice." The copyright half lists recordings including "Can't Help Falling in Love," "Don't Be Cruel," "A Little Less Conversation," "All Shook Up," "Return to Sender" and "(You're the) Devil in Disguise."
Suno's spokeswoman told Billboard that the company exists "to help people create new, original music," that it does "not allow prompts for specific artists' names and songs," and that it works with third-party providers to screen uploaded audio and lyrics. On the same Friday the same lawyers filed a separate copyright suit against Suno for Eight Mile Style, the publisher of much of Eminem's catalog, citing "Lose Yourself," "Without Me," "Stan" and other songs. Billboard's report does not identify the court for either case, and Quentir has not seen the complaints themselves, so the allegations here are as reported. None of them has been tested.
What Tennessee's ELVIS Act changed on 1 July 2024: a voice became property in any medium
The statute itself is short. House Bill 2091, sponsored by William Lamberth, passed on 7 March 2024; Governor Bill Lee signed it in Nashville on 21 March 2024, and it became Public Chapter 588, effective 1 July 2024. It renamed Tennessee's Personal Rights Protection Act of 1984 as the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act of 2024 and made four changes that matter for this case.
First, it defines "voice" as a sound "readily identifiable and attributable to a particular individual, regardless of whether the sound contains the actual voice or a simulation of the voice." A synthetic Elvis therefore counts as his voice in law if listeners can attribute it to him. Second, it gives every individual a property right in the use of name, photograph, voice or likeness "in any medium in any manner." Third, it adds two grounds of liability that do not depend on advertising. Section 47-25-1105(a)(2) covers anyone who "publishes, performs, distributes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to the public" a voice or likeness knowing the use was not authorized. Section 47-25-1105(a)(3) covers anyone who makes available "an algorithm, software, tool, or other technology, service, or device" whose "primary purpose or function" is "the production of a particular, identifiable individual's photograph, voice, or likeness," again with knowledge that it was unauthorized. Fourth, where a company holds an exclusive recording contract with an artist or an exclusive license to distribute the artist's recordings, either that company or the artist may sue.
A fifth provision explains why the plaintiff is an estate business nearly fifty years after Presley's death in 1977. Tennessee's post-mortem right ends only after two years of non-use following the first ten years, and the 2024 Act provides that "use" includes the commercial availability of a sound recording in which the individual's voice is readily identifiable. A catalog that stays on sale keeps the voice right alive.
Why the "primary purpose or function" test in section 47-25-1105(a)(3) is the hard question for Suno
The tool clause reads most naturally on narrow targets: an app sold to clone a specific singer, or a model fine-tuned on one artist's stems. Suno is a general music generator. On the statutory wording, a plaintiff must show that a tool's primary purpose or function is producing a particular, identifiable individual's voice, and that the provider knew the output was unauthorized. Suno's public answer, that it blocks artist names and screens uploads, is aimed squarely at both elements: a system that tries to stop impersonation is harder to describe as one built for it.
The complaint's videos aim at the gap between the stated design and observed behavior. If a name typed into lyrics still yields a voice listeners identify as Presley's, the plaintiff can argue a claim under (a)(2), which requires proof that Suno made the voice available to the public and knew the use was unauthorized. It can also argue that a filter that fails in practice says little about a tool's actual function. Billboard does not report which subsections the complaint pleads, so this is Quentir's reading of how the two clauses divide the ground. The answer has technical content. Whether a voice is "readily identifiable" can be argued with listener studies and speaker-verification models, the same kind of tool used to detect cloned voices in phone fraud.
The Act also carries a limit that will matter well beyond Suno. The 2024 amendments tied the statute's existing exemption in section 47-25-1107(a) to the Constitution, adding the words "to the extent protected by the First Amendment." Memphis supports a whole trade of Elvis tribute performers, whose voices are trained human simulations that listeners attribute to Presley. The statute does not mention them, so the line between homage and appropriation will be drawn by courts case by case.
How the copyright claims connect to the 23 October suit against Anthropic and the earlier label cases
The copyright counts repeat a theory Presley's owners filed two weeks earlier. On Friday, 23 October 2026, Elvis Presley Enterprises sued Anthropic, alleging that it infringed 274 Presley songs in training its Claude models. Suno already faces suits by the major labels and a class action by Jason Isbell and other artists that also alleges likeness theft. Courts are now deciding training claims on their own facts. The Third Circuit's 29 September ruling in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS turned on whether copying Westlaw headnotes to train a competing legal tool was fair use, and Advocate General Szpunar's opinion of 3 November in Like Company v. Google asked when a chatbot's answer reproduces a publisher's expression. The voice claim in the Suno case asks a different question: whether an output that sounds like a person takes something the law treats as theirs, whatever the training data was.
How Quentir Reads It
Elvis Presley Enterprises v. Suno shifts the AI music dispute toward what a model outputs and toward the person whose voice it resembles. A training claim requires proof about datasets, which often depends on discovery. A voice claim under the ELVIS Act can be argued from what any user can hear, and the complaint's linked videos show the plaintiff building its case that way. The defense will turn on design: how a platform filters names, how it screens uploads, and what it knew about failures. That makes the engineering of guardrails a legal fact, with consequences for model providers, labels and insurers well outside Tennessee, because a music platform serves users in every state.
The human stake is concrete. A working singer's voice is the asset a career is built on, and the Act treats it as property that can outlive the singer when the recordings stay in commerce. The open question is how far that property reaches into general-purpose tools. If the tool-supply claim is pleaded and reaches a ruling, that decision will show whether a court reads "primary purpose or function" by a product's stated design or by what it actually produces.
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Sources: Billboard, "Elvis Presley Rights Owners Sue Suno Over AI Voice Cloning", 7 November 2026; Billboard, "Elvis Presley Estate Sues Anthropic", 24 October 2026; Tennessee General Assembly, House Bill 2091 / Senate Bill 2096, bill history; Tennessee Secretary of State, Public Chapter 588 (2024), Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act of 2024, effective 1 July 2024, amending Tenn. Code Ann. §§ 47-25-1101 to 47-25-1108; Office of the Governor of Tennessee, "Gov. Lee Signs ELVIS Act Into Law", 21 March 2024; Midler v. Ford Motor Co., 849 F.2d 460 (9th Cir. 1988). Links checked 8 November 2026.
Published intelligence, built to inform your own decisions. Published: November 8, 2026.