Facts
A nationally known screenwriter, actor and comedian discovered that his voice was being used in advertisements for an app. He alleged that the app, through AI trained on his voice data, let users pay to have any sentence they chose spoken in his voice. He sought an order stopping and preventing the infringement of his personality rights and partial damages of TRY 10,000 (pecuniary) and TRY 50,000 (non-pecuniary), relying on Article 20 of the Constitution, the data protection law, Articles 23-25 of the Civil Code and Article 58 of the Code of Obligations. The defendant said the audio had been deleted, the plaintiff had made the data public himself, and the voice used was computer-altered.
Question
The Ankara 38th Civil Court of First Instance, which first heard the case, declined jurisdiction in favour of the specialised intellectual property court, and that ruling became final. The Ankara 3rd Intellectual and Industrial Property Rights Court, to which the file was sent, also declined jurisdiction on 19 February 2026, holding that the plaintiff was not the person who had fixed the recording and that Articles 84 and 86 of the Copyright Act (FSEK) did not apply. On appeal the question was whether a claim for injunctive relief and damages based on alleged AI voice cloning falls under Law No. 5846 (FSEK) or under the general law.
Decision
The chamber found that the plaintiff based both his injunctive and declaratory claims and his damages claims on the Constitution, the data protection law, the Civil Code and the Code of Obligations, and made no claim under Law No. 5846 on Intellectual and Artistic Works. Since nothing in a claim based on unauthorised use of personal data required the application of FSEK, the IP court had been right to decline jurisdiction. The appeal was dismissed on the merits under Article 353(1)(b)(1) of the Code of Civil Procedure, unanimously and with no further appeal under Article 362(1)(c). The court did not rule on whether the voice data had been processed unlawfully or on damages.
Why it matters
Where the claim is framed as it was here, the ruling places AI cloning of a real person's voice within personality rights and data protection, outside intellectual property. The chamber resolved the jurisdiction question by looking at the legal grounds pleaded and the absence of any claim under FSEK. The two successive refusals of jurisdiction also show how a dispute over the proper forum can delay such claims. The substantive questions, including the lawfulness of processing the voice data and damages, will be examined by the general civil court.