Coca-Cola Fires Back Against Johnny Cash Estate Lawsuit

Photo Credit: Chris Mac

Remember the Johnny Cash estate’s ELVIS Act lawsuit against the Coca-Cola Company? Nearly six months later, the beverage giant has officially fired back against the complaint.

Coca-Cola just recently submitted a straightforward answer to the suit, which, we reported this past November, revolves around an August 2025 Coke and college-football advert entitled “Go the Distance.”

The way the plaintiff tells the story, Coca-Cola tapped an ad agency to create the spot, complete with “a sound recording containing a male singing voice.” And as that voice reportedly belongs to a Johnny Cash tribute singer, the work in question purportedly “sounds remarkably like” the Man in Black.

(Said non-party tribute singer is Shawn Barker, who “has an uncanny resemblance to” Cash and has sold north of one million concert tickets across his decades-long career, according to his website. Moreover, Thomas Gabriel, Cash’s grandson, is an active musician who many fans say sounds like his grandfather.)

Though it probably goes without saying in light of the complaint, this isn’t the “actual” voice of Cash, and the artist’s estate didn’t sign off on the alleged soundalike effort; “Coca-Cola never even bothered to ask the Trust for a license,” per the suit.

And while Tennessee enacted the ELVIS Act with unauthorized artificial intelligence soundalike creations in mind, the law technically added voice and likeness protections to an existing property right without mentioning AI at all.

In other words, at least in theory, the little-tested law seemingly extends to non-machine-generated works as well.

Back to Coca-Cola’s retort, the company’s line-by-line refutation of the suit doesn’t appear to contain any groundbreaking claims.

However, the defendant is adamant that the advert isn’t infringing; the Cash estate allegedly “lacks standing to assert the rights underlying its claims” and purportedly “intentionally relinquished rights to some or all of the material in which it claims rights,” per the answer.

Furthermore, Team Cash allegedly “unreasonably delayed efforts to enforce its rights” and allegedly “suffered no provable injury” from the alleged conduct.

With that, time will tell how the Cash estate responds and where the showdown goes from here; a trial is tentatively scheduled not for 2026’s final month, but for December 2027. At the top level, the legal battle’s plodding pace, complete with plenty of procedural back and forth, underscores the considerable time and money required to spearhead rights-related cases.

And in the bigger picture, there are, of course, only so many voices and especially artist names out there.

Would the Coke ad’s Cash tribute singer be unable to lawfully create AI-powered soundalike recordings based on his own voice? When exactly does non-AI soundalike audio “cross the line” and set the stage for litigation? Perhaps the Cash estate v. Coca-Cola case will provide a bit of clarity on these fronts.