Your face and voice as property

A right that is not copyright

You do not own the copyright in a photograph of yourself — the photographer does. What many legal systems give you instead is a separate right in your identity: your name, image, voice and other recognisable attributes. It goes by different names — right of publicity, personality rights, image rights, passing off — and it has become the most active area of AI law, because cloning a person is now trivial.

Where the law has moved

India has developed this quickly through the courts rather than statute. The Delhi High Court granted Anil Kapoor broad protection in 2023 covering his name, image, voice and mannerisms against unauthorised commercial use including AI-generated content. Similar orders followed for other public figures, and the Bombay High Court granted the singer Arijit Singh relief in 2024 specifically addressing AI voice cloning. These are personality rights developed through injunctions, and they are among the most AI-specific orders anywhere.

Tennessee passed the ELVIS Act in 2024, adding voice explicitly to its protected attributes and creating liability for tools whose primary purpose is producing unauthorised simulations. California enacted provisions in 2024 on digital replicas in performer contracts and on the use of deceased performers' likenesses. A federal US bill on digital replicas has been introduced repeatedly without passing.

Denmark proposed in 2025 to give individuals a copyright-like right over their own likeness and voice, which would be a structural departure from the usual approach and is being watched across Europe.

The EU AI Act requires disclosure of deep fakes, which is a transparency obligation rather than a property right — a different mechanism aimed at the same problem.

The harm that dominates by volume

Non-consensual intimate imagery. The measurements have been consistent since the first surveys of deepfake material in 2019: the overwhelming majority of it is sexual, and almost all of it targets women. Most victims are not famous. School-age cases, made by classmates from ordinary social media photographs, are now reported regularly in many countries.

The legal response has accelerated. The UK's Online Safety Act 2023 addressed sharing, and subsequent legislation moved to cover creation. The US TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in 2025, criminalises publication of non-consensual intimate images including synthetic ones and requires platforms to remove them within a short window of a valid request. India prosecutes through the IT Act's provisions on obscenity, transmission of sexual material and violation of privacy, alongside criminal law provisions.

If this happens to you or someone you know: preserve evidence including URLs and timestamps before reporting, use the platform's specific NCII reporting route rather than a general report, and know that services such as StopNCII operate a hash-based system that lets you register an image so participating platforms can block it without you sending the image anywhere. Reporting to police is worth doing even where the law is unclear, because the record matters later.

For creators and businesses

Three practical points.

Consent for a likeness is not consent for a synthetic version of it. A model release signed for a photoshoot in 2019 almost certainly does not cover training a model on those images. Newer contracts address it explicitly, and older ones do not.

Voice actors and performers have been the most organised. The 2023 strikes in the US screen and games industries produced contractual terms on digital replicas — consent, compensation and scope — that are now a template. If you commission a voice, the terms should say whether a synthetic version may be made, for what, and for how long.

Deceased people are covered differently everywhere. Some jurisdictions extend rights after death for a term; others do not. Using a dead performer's voice or face is a jurisdiction-specific question with a different answer in Tennessee, California, Delhi and London.

The uncomfortable part

Strong likeness rights protect people from being cloned and also create a mechanism for suppressing satire, criticism and journalism, which have always depended on using someone's image without their permission. Every serious proposal in this area is trying to hold both, and the drafting is genuinely hard. Watch for exceptions for news, commentary, parody and artistic works, because that is where a good law and a bad one differ.