Your father's voice may soon come with a licence agreement

Under a model deed now being discussed by a group of estate practitioners, the synthetic voice of a deceased person could be held as an asset of the estate: inherited, valued, licensed for a fee, and disposed of by a vote of the beneficiaries. The drafters stress that the deed creates no such right. It assumes the right exists, which they regard as the more useful assumption.

The asset would not be a recording. It would be a model, built from whatever the person happened to leave behind: voicemails, a speech at a wedding, forty minutes of a video call nobody got around to deleting. In the deed's language this material is the source corpus, a phrase that appears on the same page as the word bereavement.

The appendix works through a case. An agency offers a fee for thirty seconds of narration for a pharmacy chain — national radio, six months, no visual. Three of the five beneficiaries vote in favour. Two vote against, one of them in writing, at length. The deed provides for the three, because deeds provide for majorities, and the proceeds go to the estate.

“The deed does not ask whether a family should do this,” a practitioner attached to the drafting group would be expected to say. “It asks who decides, and in what order. These conversations were going to happen in kitchens at eleven at night regardless. We thought a form might be kinder, and we are aware how that sounds.”

The minority position would be the more interesting one. What the vote distributes is not money but the sound of a particular person saying words they did not say, in a tone they used for something else — for reading aloud, or for apologising. The deed offers a clause for this: restricted categories, a list a person may set out while alive. Most people would not set one out. Most people do not make a will at all.

There is a practical problem underneath, and it is a strange one. For the asset to exist, somebody must not delete the voicemails. A generation that never curated its own recordings would find that it had assembled an archive anyway, and that the archive is now an asset, with a valuation, a licensing history and an annual line in the estate accounts.

None of this is settled law, and the deed is a template with no case behind it. But somewhere in the worked example there is a line for income received by the estate during the reporting period, and in the appendix it is not zero. That is the line the drafters expect to change the conversation, and the one they would least like to be quoted on.