‘Alright, Alright, Alright’ -Can You Trademark A Catchphrase? Celebrity Identity, AI, And The New Frontier Of Trademark Law

Introduction

Picture a trademark examiner at the USPTO staring at an application for three words -’Alright, alright, alright.’ Not a logo. Not a brand name. Just a drawl, a cadence, a vocal fingerprint that the world has associated with one man since a 1993 coming-of-age film about Texas teenagers and muscle cars. It sounds absurd. And yet, in January 2026, Matthew McConaughey walked away with eight registered trademarks covering exactly that -his voice, his catchphrase, his identity.

Days before this piece was written, Taylor Swift followed suit, filing three trademark applications with the USPTO -two covering her voice and one protecting a signature stage image.¹ The stated purpose, in both cases, was the same: artificial intelligence. Specifically, the kind of AI that can clone a voice from a few seconds of audio, generate a hyper-realistic deepfake, and have a celebrity endorse a product they have never seen, say something they never said, or appear somewhere they never were.

This development raises a question that would have seemed like academic speculation five years ago but is now very much alive: can a catchphrase -or a voice, or a persona -actually be protected as a trademark? And if so, is trademark law really the right vehicle for fighting AI-generated identity theft? This blog works through both questions, examining the legal landscape in the United States and India, and asking whether the law is keeping pace with the technology it is being asked to restrain.

The McConaughey Move: What Happened and Why It Matters

The story begins more quietly than the headlines suggest. In late 2023, attorneys at entertainment law firm Yorn Levine filed a sound mark application with the USPTO on McConaughey’s behalf -specifically, an audio recording of him saying those three words in the way only he can. The application took two years to process. By January 2026, it had become one of eight registered marks protecting different facets of the actor’s voice and visual identity.²

What is legally fascinating about the registration is how precise it is. The USPTO description of the mark reads: “The mark consists of a man saying ‘ALRIGHT ALRIGHT ALRIGHT’, wherein the first syllable of the first two words is at a lower pitch than the second syllable, and the first syllable of the last word is at a higher pitch than the second syllable."³ That is not a trademark in any conventional sense. It is a pitch map. A vocal signature so specific that it describes not just what McConaughey says, but how -the intonation, the rhythm, the very texture of the delivery.

His attorney Jonathan Pollack was candid about the strategy: these registrations, he explained, give McConaughey the legal standing to ‘stop someone in their tracks or take them to federal court’ the moment an AI system misuses his likeness.⁴ McConaughey himself was characteristically direct: he simply wants ‘consent and attribution to be the norm in an AI world.’⁵ Nothing had gone wrong yet. The point was to ensure something was in place before it did.

Taylor Swift moved faster. On April 24, 2026, her company TAS Rights Management filed three applications -sound marks for ‘Hey, it’s Taylor Swift’ and ‘Hey, it’s Taylor,’ and a visual mark for her signature stage persona.⁶ Trademark attorney Josh Gerben, who spotted the filings first, called them ‘specifically designed to protect Taylor from threats posed by artificial intelligence.’⁷ Two of the biggest names in entertainment, acting within months of each other, arriving at the same legal solution. That alone tells you something about the urgency of the problem.

Can a Catchphrase Actually Be Trademarked? The Legal Framework

A. Under United States Law

The Lanham Act defines a trademark as any word, name, symbol, or device -or combination thereof -capable of identifying and distinguishing the source of goods or services.⁸ The definition is deliberately broad, and the USPTO has long accepted that non-traditional marks -sounds, colours, shapes, even scents -can qualify, so long as they do what a trademark is supposed to do: tell consumers where something comes from.

The harder question is distinctiveness. The USPTO will not register a phrase that is generic, purely descriptive, or so commonly used that no single entity can claim ownership of it. ‘Go for it’ belongs to everyone. ‘Best Quality’ describes itself. Neither can serve as a trademark. But when a phrase acquires secondary meaning when the public stops hearing it as ordinary language and starts hearing it as a signal pointing to one specific source -the calculus changes. Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ and McDonald’s ‘I’m Lovin’ It’ are the textbook examples: expressions that were, once upon a time, just English, but through relentless commercial use became synonymous with their owners.

McConaughey’s case sits in more interesting territory. ‘Alright, alright, alright’ was never a commercial slogan -it was a film line, stumbled upon by a young actor on his first day of shooting, that over three decades became so completely identified with him that it is essentially his verbal calling card. The legal argument his attorneys pursued is that this kind of deep, cultural, persona-linked association can itself satisfy the source-identifying function that trademark law demands. Whether courts will agree -if and when it is tested -remains to be seen.

B. Sound Marks: A Brief History

Sound marks are not new. The MGM lion’s roar, NBC’s three-note chime, and the Pillsbury Doughboy’s giggle are all registered US trademarks, and they work precisely because consumers hear them and instantly know what they are looking at.⁹ The function is no different from a logo or a brand name -the sound identifies an origin.

What McConaughey and Swift are doing, however, is a different proposition. They are not registering sounds designed as commercial identifiers. They are registering naturally occurring vocal patterns that happen to be uniquely associated with them as individuals. As trademark attorney Gerben put it, this is ‘a new use of trademark registration that has not been tested in court before.’¹⁰ The legal framework technically accommodates it. Whether it practically works as an enforcement tool is a separate question -one that only litigation will answer.

C. The Position in India

India’s Trade Marks Act, 1999 is, on paper, hospitable to these kinds of claims. Section 2(m) defines ‘mark’ broadly enough to encompass words, names, signatures, shapes, and combinations of colours. Section 2(zb) requires that a trademark be capable of graphical representation and capable of distinguishing the goods or services of one person from those of others. Slogans and catchphrases can, in principle, satisfy both conditions -provided they are sufficiently distinctive.

Indian courts have grappled with slogan protection on multiple occasions. The Delhi High Court, in PepsiCo Inc. v. Hindustan Coca Cola Ltd. & Anr., extended common law passing off protection to ‘Yeh Dil Maange More’ even in the absence of copyright cover.¹¹ Similarly, in Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Tianjin) Co. Ltd. v. Anchor Health & Beauty Care Pvt. Ltd., the court upheld protection for ‘All Round Protection’, finding that Anchor had built sufficient market recognition around the tagline to justify exclusive rights.¹²

But the courts have also drawn boundaries. The Karnataka High Court’s refusal to protect ‘I am what I am’ in Reebok India Company v. Gomzi Active was grounded in the observation that generic phrases -regardless of how widely used they are in advertising -cannot function as source identifiers when they carry no inherent connection to a specific commercial entity.¹³ The principle that emerges from this body of case law is clear: memorability alone is not enough. A catchphrase must point unambiguously to one source before it earns trademark protection.

India does, in theory, accommodate sound marks. Rule 26(5) of the Trade Marks Rules, 2017 requires that applications for sound marks be accompanied by an MP3 file and a graphical representation of the sound in musical notation.¹⁴ In practice, however, sound mark registrations in India remain rare, and no Indian public figure has yet adopted the McConaughey–Swift strategy. That may be a gap worth watching -particularly as AI-generated deepfakes of Indian celebrities become more prevalent.

The AI Problem: Why Existing Law Is Not Enough

To understand why McConaughey and Swift reached for trademark law, it helps to understand why everything else fell short.

Copyright was the obvious first port of call. It protects songs, recordings, films -the kind of creative output that celebrities produce. But copyright has a well-known blind spot: it does not protect a voice, a style, or a way of speaking. An AI model trained on McConaughey’s audio outputs does not copy any specific recording- it learns a pattern and then generates something new in that pattern’s image. No court has held that mimicking a vocal style, as opposed to reproducing a specific work, constitutes copyright infringement.¹⁵ The law simply was not built to address this.

Right of publicity laws come closer. In the United States, they protect individuals against the unauthorised commercial use of their name, likeness, or identity. Several states have them; some are quite robust. But they are state-level laws -fragmented, inconsistent, and limited in their reach. More practically, they are anchored to commercial use. A deepfake that is simply shared for entertainment, without being used to sell anything, may not technically engage these laws at all.

Trademark law plugs both gaps- at least partially. Under the Lanham Act, infringement requires only a likelihood of consumer confusion, not proof of commercial exploitation in the narrow sense.¹⁶ An AI-generated clip of McConaughey’s voice endorsing a product could easily confuse consumers about whether he authorised it. Trademark claims also belong in federal court, giving them national reach from the outset. And critically, once a mark is registered, the owner has a presumptively valid property right -which makes it far easier to secure emergency injunctions and force platforms to take down infringing content quickly.

None of this is certain, of course. The ‘trademark yourself’ strategy has yet to be tested in actual litigation. But in a legal landscape where copyright offers no help and publicity rights are patchy, it represents the most immediately available tool -and for celebrities whose identities are genuinely at risk, that matters.

The Sceptics Are Not Wrong Either

It would be intellectually dishonest to present the ‘trademark yourself’ strategy as a clean solution. There are real problems with it, and they deserve to be taken seriously.

The most fundamental is a mismatch between the purpose of trademark law and what these registrations are trying to achieve. Trademark law was invented to prevent consumer confusion about the commercial origin of products -to stop one company from passing off its goods as another's. It was not designed to protect individuals from identity appropriation. A deepfake of McConaughey’s voice does not, in any intuitive sense, confuse consumers about which company made a product. The commercial origin function that sits at the heart of trademark doctrine maps awkwardly onto the problem of AI-generated identity mimicry.

There is also the practical problem of enforcement. Having eight registered trademarks is not the same as having a functioning enforcement system. McConaughey’s team would need to monitor the internet -an essentially impossible task -identify infringing uses, issue notices, and pursue litigation, case by case, across potentially dozens of jurisdictions. In an environment where AI-generated content is produced at industrial scale and distributed instantaneously, the registration is more of a legal foundation than an operational shield.

Then there is the scope problem. As Gerben himself has pointed out, ‘the mere act of speaking a catchphrase is not, on its own, an act of commerce, so a trademark would not protect you from someone else just saying your phrase.’¹⁷ An AI tool generating McConaughey-style audio for personal, non-commercial use sits well outside the protective perimeter that trademark law can draw. The registration addresses commercial misuse; it does not address cultural appropriation of identity in the broader sense.

In India, these difficulties are compounded by the absence of any judicial guidance on AI-specific intellectual property questions. No Indian court has yet addressed the intersection of generative AI and trademark infringement. The existing statutory framework -designed for a pre-AI world -is likely to require legislative attention before it can deal meaningfully with these scenarios.

What This Means Going Forward

Despite its imperfections, the McConaughey- Swift strategy signals something important: the entertainment industry has stopped waiting for the law to catch up and has started working with what currently exists. That shift in posture has real implications across the board.

For Indian celebrities and public figures, the lesson is worth internalising. India has no standalone right of publicity statute. Claims of identity misappropriation are typically pursued through passing off under trademark law or Section-51 of the Copyright Act, and neither framework was designed with AI in mind. Proactive trademark registration of distinctive catchphrases, vocal signatures, or visual marks -while not a complete answer- would at least create a formal legal foundation from which to challenge AI-driven misuse. Given how rapidly AI-generated deepfakes of Indian film and music personalities are proliferating on social media, this is not a remote concern.

For brand owners and IP practitioners more broadly, the case expands the horizon of what is trademarkable. Non-traditional marks- sounds, motions, scents- have been gaining slow but steady traction in India and internationally. The McConaughey registrations push that frontier further, and IP portfolios that do not account for these categories may be leaving real value -and real protection -on the table.

For policymakers, the urgency is harder to ignore. The United States Congress has been actively debating legislation on AI-generated deepfakes and the right of individuals over their voice and likeness.¹⁸ India’s DPIIT and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology have yet to move with comparable urgency, but the window for proactive legislative action is narrowing. Amendments to both the Trade Marks Act and the Information Technology Act will eventually be necessary -the only question is whether they arrive before or after the litigation.

Perhaps the clearest signal of where things are heading came from Gerben himself, who predicted that Swift’s filings would ‘kick off a flurry of similar filings’ from celebrities worldwide.¹⁹ If he is right -and there is little reason to think he is not -Indian IP practitioners should be preparing now, not reacting later.

Conclusion

There is something almost fitting about the fact that the phrase being fought over here has three words and infinite resonance. ‘Alright, alright, alright’ -the casual, unscripted exhale of a young actor who had no idea what he was starting -has become, thirty-odd years later, a test case for one of the hardest questions in intellectual property law today: what happens when technology can impersonate a person so convincingly that the person themselves needs a legal document to prove they said something?

The trademark route is not perfect. It is expensive, it is slow, and it pushes against the conceptual grain of a doctrine built for commercial origin, not personal identity. Enforcement at AI scale is genuinely difficult. And the statutory frameworks in both the US and India will need to be updated before they can engage with these questions cleanly.

In the absence of dedicated AI legislation -in India, in the US, anywhere -’trademark yourself’ is a legally grounded, immediately available strategy that celebrities and public figures are right to take seriously. Whether the courts will ultimately validate it is a question that the next few years of litigation will answer.

What is beyond doubt, though, is the question ‘can you trademark a catchphrase?’ has moved from seminar room to courtroom and the answer -nuanced, contingent, still evolving -is: alright, alright, alright, but, only if you can prove the world already knew it was yours.

Footnotes

1. Angela Yang, ‘Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Her Voice and Likeness, Apparently to Protect Against AI Misuse’, NBC News (April 27, 2026), available at (https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/pop-culture-news/taylor-swift-files-trademark-voice-likeness-protection-ai-deepfakes-rcna342367) (last visited April 30, 2026).
2. Todd Spangler, ‘Matthew McConaughey Trademarks "Alright, Alright, Alright" to Protect Against AI Misuse’, Variety (January 14, 2026), available at (https://variety.com/2026/biz/news/matthew-mcconaughey-trademarks-alright-alright-alright-ai-misuse-1236631214/) (last visited April 30, 2026).
3. Ibid. (quoting the USPTO trademark registration description).
4. ‘Matthew McConaughey Trademarks His Catchphrase in a Bid to Beat AI Fakes’, NPR (January 17, 2026), available at (https://www.npr.org/2026/01/17/nx-s1-5680266/matthew-mcconaughey-trademarks-his-catchphrase-in-a-bid-to-beat-ai-fakes) (last visited April 30, 2026).
5. Matthew McConaughey, quoted in ‘Matthew McConaughey Trademarks "Alright, Alright, Alright"‘, The Spokesman-Review (January 16, 2026).
6. Associated Press, ‘Taylor Swift Files Trademark Applications for Her Voice and Likeness Reportedly to Curb AI Threats’, AZ Family (April 29, 2026), available at (https://www.azfamily.com/2026/04/29/taylor-swift-files-trademark-applications-her-voice-likeness-reportedly-curb-ai-threats/) (last visited April 30, 2026).
7. Josh Gerben, ‘Taylor Swift Moves to Trademark Her Voice and Image as AI Threats Grow’, Gerben IP (April 27, 2026), available at (https://www.gerbenlaw.com/blog/taylor-swift-moves-to-trademark-her-voice-and-image-as-ai-threats-grow/) (last visited April 30, 2026).
8. 15 U.S.C. § 1127 (Lanham Act, as amended).
9. Angela Yang, supra note 1; see also MGM lion roar, U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 1,395,550; NBC chimes, U.S. Trademark Reg. No. 916,522.
10. Gerben, supra note 7.
11. PepsiCo Inc. & Anr. v. Hindustan Coca Cola Ltd. & Anr., (2003) 27 PTC 305 (Del).
12. Procter & Gamble Manufacturing (Tianjin) Co. Ltd. & Ors. v. Anchor Health & Beauty Care Pvt. Ltd., (2014) 58 PTC 155 (Del).
13. Reebok India Company v. Gomzi Active, (2008) ILR Kar 1528.
14. Trade Marks Rules, 2017 (India), Rule 26(5).
15. See Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991); see also ‘AI Challenges Are Pushing Artists to Secure Trademark Protection’, Bloomberg Law (January 14, 2026).
16. ‘Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Her Voice and Likeness’, CNN Business (April 28, 2026), available at (https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/28/business/taylor-swift-trademark-ai-intl) (last visited April 30, 2026).
17. Josh Gerben, ‘Can You Trademark a Catchphrase?’, Gerben IP, available at (https://www.gerbenlaw.com/blog/can-you-trademark-a-catchphrase/) (last visited April 30, 2026).
18. See ‘Copyright & Trademark Policy and Trends to Watch in 2026’, Troutman Pepper Locke (January 2, 2026), available at (https://www.troutman.com/insights/copyright-trademark-policy-and-trends-to-watch-in-2026/) (last visited April 30, 2026).
19. Gerben, quoted in CBS News, ‘Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Her Voice and Image Amid Rise in AI Deepfakes’ (April 28, 2026), available at (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-ai-voice-likeness-trademark/) (last visited April 30, 2026).

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