Faces, voices and the rights in a person

A separate body of law

Copyright protects works. It does not protect people. A photograph of you is owned by the photographer; the fact that it is you is governed by something else entirely.

That something else has different names and different shapes:

• Right of publicity or personality rights — a right to control commercial use of your identity. Strong in parts of the United States, recognised in various forms elsewhere.
• Image rights and passing off in jurisdictions with no dedicated right, where a false endorsement claim does similar work.
• Data protection. In the European Union and the United Kingdom, a person's face and voice are personal data and, when used to identify them, biometric data with heightened protection. This is frequently the strongest and most overlooked instrument.
• Defamation, where the depiction says something false and damaging.
• Specific criminal offences for non-consensual sexual imagery and for fraudulent impersonation, which more jurisdictions add each year.

Where the law has moved recently

This is the fastest-moving area in the whole field, and a few concrete markers are worth knowing.

Several US states have enacted statutes aimed specifically at synthetic replicas of voice and likeness, including one framed around musicians' voices, and further federal proposals have been introduced without yet becoming law. Coverage of deceased persons varies by state and is one of the sharper differences.

Indian courts have granted a series of personality-rights orders protecting named public figures against unauthorised use of their name, image, voice and mannerisms, including at least one specifically addressing AI voice cloning of a singer. These are injunctions in individual cases rather than a statute, and they have built quickly into a recognisable line.

Denmark has proposed giving people a copyright-like right over their own likeness, which would be a significant departure if enacted, and at the time of writing it remains a proposal.

The European Union's AI Act adds transparency duties for deepfakes on top of the existing data-protection position, with those obligations applying from 2026.

The direction is consistent even though the instruments differ: more protection, more specifically aimed at synthetic replicas, arriving faster than most legal change.

The practical standard

Because the law is uneven and moving, the workable rule is not a legal test. It is a practice standard that satisfies most of them:

Consent that is informed, specific, written, time-limited and revocable, with payment where the use is commercial.

Read those five conditions again, because each one fails a common shortcut. Verbal agreement fails "written". A blanket release fails "specific". A perpetual grant fails "time-limited". "You agreed once" fails "revocable".

And separately, disclosure to the audience, which the person depicted cannot waive on the audience's behalf.

The cases that are simply off limits

Some things need no legal analysis:

• Sexual imagery of any real person without consent. Criminal in a growing number of jurisdictions and wrong everywhere.
• Anything depicting a child.
• Fabricated statements attributed to a real person, presented as real.
• Impersonation for fraud.
• Using a dead person's likeness where the family objects. The law varies; the judgement does not have to.

The awkward middle

Satire and comment have protection in many systems and it is not unlimited, and a photorealistic fabrication is treated differently from an obvious caricature precisely because one can be mistaken for a record.

A person who resembles someone. Prompting for a type rather than a name can still produce a recognisable individual, and recognisability is generally the test rather than intent.

Historical figures. Generally lower risk, and reconstructions of real historical people presented without labelling raise a different and serious problem about the record.

Your own likeness, licensed to a client. Increasingly common and worth negotiating deliberately, because a synthetic version of you is an asset that outlives the campaign.

The unresolved part: nobody has settled how far these rights extend to a style of performance rather than an identity — a voice that sounds like a genre rather than a person, a face assembled from features. Cases are beginning to test it. Until then, recognisability is the practical line, and if people recognise the person, treat it as their right regardless of how the image was assembled.