Here’s a weird potential future: When you’re born, you are issued a birth certificate, a social security card, and a copyright. That possibility is emerging in Denmark, where officials are considering changes to the nation’s copyright laws to provide citizens with a right to their own likeness as a means of combating AI-generated deepfakes, according to The Guardian.
The proposal, advanced by the Danish Ministry of Culture and expected for a parliamentary vote this fall, would grant Danish citizens copyright control over their own image, facial features, and voice. This protection would, in theory, allow Danes to demand that online platforms remove deepfakes and other digital manipulations that were shared without their consent. It would also cover “realistic, digitally generated imitations” of an artist’s performance without consent, so no AI-generated versions of your favorite artists’ songs would be allowed.
In addition to granting copyright protections to people, the proposed amendment would establish “severe fines” for any tech platform that does not comply with the law and respond to requests for takedown. The person who is impersonated in the deepfake could also seek compensation.
Such protections, however, could create unintended consequences. For instance, could a person use their copyright protection to request the takedown of an image they simply don’t like? The amendment seems designed to relate only to deepfakes, which it defines as a “very realistic digital representation of a person,” including their appearance and voice, according to the report. It also would still allow parodies and satire, so some of the standard doctrine of fair use would still apply.
“In the bill we agree and are sending an unequivocal message that everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice and their own facial features, which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI,” Danish culture minister, Jakob Engel-Schmidt, told The Guardian. “Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes and I’m not willing to accept that.”
Denmark is far from the only nation taking action on deepfakes. Earlier this year, the United States passed the Take It Down Act, a much more narrowly defined bill that gives people the right to request that platforms take down nonconsensually shared sexually explicit images of them—though some activists have argued that the law is ill-defined and could be weaponized by those acting in bad faith.
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