"“It being animate all of a sudden for some reason feels too invasive,” said Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington. “If [Ma] were to gain commercially in almost any way from this, and even arguably the notoriety he has gained from this, Scarlett Johansson could almost certainly sue him.”
This isn’t the first time someone’s built a robot that resembles a celebrity. As Calo notes in a recent paper, Samsung ran a series of ads in the early 1990s that featured a robot in a fancy dress and a blonde wig who was turning letters on a wall in what was a clear depiction of Wheel of Fortune star Vanna White, even if the bot did have a metal face. White sued, and won, showing that “Samsung spent a lot of money on the ads, and that they also paid Morton Downey Jr. a lot of money to be in the other ads,” says Calo."