A Santa Clara County Superior Court judge has ruled that Google cannot shake off a lawsuit from former NPR Morning Edition co-host David Greene, who alleges the tech giant used his voice without permission to build its NotebookLM artificial intelligence product. Judge Shella Deen overruled Google's attempt to dismiss all four causes of action in Greene's complaint on October 23, allowing the case to move forward in California state court.
The ruling doesn't settle whether Google actually used Greene's voice — only that his legal claims survive Google's challenge, according to Law360. Greene filed the case on January 23, alleging Google used copies of his voice to develop, train and refine its AI podcasting tool, as CNET reported. NotebookLM's Audio Overviews feature, introduced in September 2024, turns documents a user uploads into a podcast-style conversation between male and female AI hosts.
Greene spent almost 10 years hosting Morning Edition and reported for NPR on the White House for four years, according to seed reporting from Radio Ink. He also hosted NPR's Up First podcast and now hosts Left, Right & Center along with other shows. CNET notes he currently hosts several podcasts, including David Greene Is Obsessed, in addition to KCRW's Left, Right & Center.
Listeners and a Forensic Firm Flagged the Similarity
Greene has said people began telling him the male NotebookLM voice sounded like his own after the feature debuted in fall 2024, per the same CNET account. Per the complaint, as relayed by Radio Ink, listeners wrote that the male voice sounds exactly like Greene, and a forensic voice-recognition firm found relatively high evidence of a match. Separately, CNET reported that a forensic software company Greene hired returned a confidence rating of 53% to 60% that his voice was used to train the software behind NotebookLM.
Greene told NPR that the resemblance goes beyond the sound of his voice. “It's not just the voice,” he said, pointing to speech patterns, phrases, emphasis and sentence construction that he felt echoed his own style, according to NPR. Google has denied the allegations, calling them baseless and saying the male NotebookLM voice was based on a professional actor it paid to record the audio, per CNET.
How the Case Reached a California Courtroom
Per Radio Ink's seed reporting, Google initially moved the case to federal court, but a U.S. District Court judge in the Northern District of California sent it back to state court on July 23. That federal ruling rejected Google's argument that the Copyright Act preempted Greene's claims, finding instead that a voice itself is not copyrightable and that Greene's claims concern the program's outputs rather than its inputs, according to Law360's account of the proceedings.
Greene's complaint brings four causes of action: a statutory right-of-publicity claim under California Civil Code Section 3344, an unfair-competition claim, a common-law misappropriation claim, and a quasi-contract and unjust-enrichment claim. He is seeking damages, restitution, disgorgement and injunctive relief, though his complaint does not specify a dollar figure, according to the LNP | LancasterOnline interview with Greene. Per the complaint as described by Radio Ink, Google offers NotebookLM through paid subscriptions, including a Google One AI Premium tier priced at $19.99 per month, and used the male AI voice in a December 2024 partnership with Spotify.
A Novel Test of an Old Statute
In her ruling, Judge Deen rejected Google's argument that Greene's journalism, rather than his voice, is what made him well known. She found that a radio broadcaster's voice can reasonably be inferred to be widely known, according to Radio Ink's reporting on the decision. Deen also described the case as a novel application of a statute enacted long before generative AI existed, while noting that whether Google actually built the male host's voice from Greene's recordings or from another source remains an unresolved factual question.
The dispute lands amid wider attention to AI voice cloning. In 2024, actress Scarlett Johansson raised concerns about an OpenAI voice that sounded similar to hers, and OpenAI removed the sound-alike, per CNET. Elsewhere in the industry, voice-AI company ElevenLabs struck a deal to license voices from celebrities including Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine, pointing to an emerging market for authorized voice licensing rather than disputed resemblance.
Congress has also been weighing broader protections in this space. The NO FAKES Act of 2026 would create a federal right allowing individuals to control digital replicas of their voice, according to materials on Congress.gov. Radio Ink reports the bill stalled in Congress this month and isn't expected to see action until the congressional session resumes following the midterms, leaving Greene's state-court case as the active legal test of these issues for now.
