Op-Ed: Video game performers on strike for their biometric rights – Now what?

Industry reps see the cosplaying crowds as evidence the gaming sector is recovering after a rocky few years. — © AFP

As usual, the media sector is trying to get rights for voices and images for nothing. The distributors are either refusing to negotiate or dodging the issues. The SAG AFTRA performers are quite rightly worried about giving their future work away.

There’s so much wrong with this issue that you could write an encyclopedia. The fundamentals are turgid but critically important:

AI-generated content derived from performers is really just a slightly different type of deepfakes. Deepfakes are much more than just shoddy copies of originals. They’re credible, which is why they’re dangerous.

They’re also a blatant form of identity theft by definition if they cause injury to the party they copy. As a matter of fact, even the baseline legal definition of identity theft is much less demanding than 100% ID, which is what biometrics provide. Biometrics are a virtual birth certificate.  

If someone uses your driver’s license to commit fraud or open a bank account, who’s at risk? Not the fraudster. The owner of the face is the prime suspect. Someone could put you in serious debt and destroy your credit rating in seconds.

As you can see, none of these issues are theoretical. They can happen and do happen every hour of every day.

If you also need your identity as an integral part of your career, it’s at least potentially stealing your career and your future, perhaps permanently. Do you see anything performers would like about that situation? More to the point, do you see anything they could possibly trust about it?   

If you think of biometrics as rights to be assigned, it’s a lot simpler. Studios and distributors own rights to famous images of famous people.

They do not own exclusive rights to any other images of those people. They certainly don’t own “lifetime rights”.

You could say that unless an image can be defined, rights to that image can’t be assigned. The owners of those faces are the rightful owners of their images and have the right to control how those images are used.  

Biometrics are who you are, legally, in so many ways. Your image is a must-have ID. Your voiceprint, too, can be used. There’s nothing academic about these issues.

Any of these identifiers can easily be used for identity theft. That’s another good reason for not spraying the biometrics of people all over the world.

This is worse than DOXing. You can’t move to another person.

For actors, this is lethal and was one of the reasons for the long SAG AFTRA strike a while back It’s not quite the same thing for video game performers, though. This is really their critical stock in trade. If they can’t protect themselves and their rights, they’ve got nothing.

You can’t use CGI in your portfolio. You can’t tell a production company, “Oh, yeah, I was that CGI in Revenge of the Jalapenos 5” and expect to get any traction.

Many video game performers are very much in demand specifically because of their character portrayal and their versatility in multiple roles. They’re supposed to give those away for nothing? It’s more obscene than absurd.

Now the real killer:

It would be incredibly easy to license biometric rights for something specific like a series. The video performer does a series of takes on which any future generated content is based and gets credits and payments accordingly.

So, as a performer, you’re James Bond or Lara Croft for 3 video games. You do very much the same work you do now. You provided the character role-playing.

The filler is generated content as may be required for production purposes. This is more economics than anything else. Why should the performer, or the production, spend millions on something that can be better and more quickly done as CGI? The performer makes the usual peanuts, and the company spends so much money. CGI makes sense in many ways.

You also provide the expert oversight and inputs needed to iron out scripts and add skill sets to character delivery or lines or images. That translates into sales.

As a performer, you can and must have control over how your biometric rights are used. That’s pretty simple even by Hollywood contract standards, which are notorious for including practically anything.

Above all:

This whole unnecessary, sloppy issue can be killed stone-cold dead by one lawsuit. If a court rules that biometric rights are the property of the performers, case buried. Thousands of such cheapskate contracts could be invalidated that quickly. Does anyone in the sector really need such a total cluster? Maybe not.

There’s no way any person’s biometric rights and ownership can be transferred per se. There’s no legal way of doing that. These biometrics are rights, so they have to be managed like rights. They are effectively “electronic rights” anyway.

There shouldn’t be any issues. Fix it.