A couple of years ago I uploaded twenty-two photographs of myself into a novelty app that turned them into portraits — the astronaut, the Renaissance noble, the noir detective. Accepting the terms took four seconds. I remember the reasoning exactly, because I have had to sit with it since: these photos are already online, my face is not a secret, and what is the worst that happens?
That is the thing I told myself was fine.
What I actually handed over was a clean, well-lit training set of one specific human being, plus a permission I did not read, under a body of law I could not have named, in a state I had not thought about. That last variable quietly decides the other three: whether the upload was a nothing or a something depends on where I was sitting when I tapped Accept.
On June 11, 2026, one American state answered that question in a way no other state has phrased quite the same.
What Washington actually put on the books
Washington State's personality rights chapter now says, flatly, that every individual has a property right in the use of their name, voice, signature, photograph, forged digital likeness, or likeness. Notice where the new words sit. Not in a deepfake annex, not in the criminal code — between "signature" and "likeness," treated as the same kind of thing.
Gov. Bob Ferguson signed Substitute Senate Bill 5886 into law in March, and the legislature's own record gives its effective date as June 11, 2026. Just over two months ago.
Here is the part that matters if this ever happens to you. The final bill report raises the civil penalty to three thousand dollars and, for a forged digital likeness, adds noneconomic damages whether or not the infringement results in any profit. In accountant's prose: the humiliation itself is the injury. The vote was 47–0 in the Senate, 85–9 in the House.
And the definition the legislature wrote is broader than "deepfake" suggests: it covers a visual representation or audio recording "either persistent or transmitted in real-time." The live call, not just the saved file. The synthetic you on a Tuesday stand-up is in scope.
So far, so good. A state named a new harm, priced it, and passed it almost unanimously — becoming one of about a dozen states that have modified their right of publicity laws to address digital replicas at all.
About a dozen. Out of fifty.
Now cross a state line
You have probably seen the big number. As of June 2026, at least 45 states have enacted at least one deepfake law. That sounds solved. It is one of the more misleading statistics in American tech policy: the same tally sorts those laws into three distinct bodies — sexual imagery, elections, and voice cloning and digital likeness. Only the third is about your face being used to sell something. Forty-five states have written a deepfake law. Roughly a dozen have written this one.
And the dozen do not agree. State laws vary in who they cover, what consent they require, and how long the protection lasts; several demand your identity have commercial value before it counts at all. Bloomberg Law reported in April 2023 that the states cannot agree what species of right it is: a New York federal court read that state's publicity law as closer to a privacy right, while California's has been interpreted as an intellectual property right. Privacy and property are not cousins — different plaintiffs, different remedies, different afterlives.
Tennessee acted in 2024: its ELVIS Act made certain uses of a person's voice or likeness unlawful when copied or imitated without consent, including by artificial intelligence, and refused to let distributors and platforms off the hook. New York went the other way, choosing disclosure over damages by requiring advertisers to conspicuously disclose the use of a synthetic performer. Three states, three theories of what has been done to you — and none of them asks where you live before the video arrives.
None of this is new. The US Copyright Office wrote it down in July 2024, finding that "the result is a patchwork of protections, with the availability of a remedy dependent on where the affected individual lives or where the unauthorized use occurred." State laws, it said, "are both inconsistent and insufficient in various respects." Citing "an urgent need for a robust nationwide remedy," it recommended that Congress enact a new federal law protecting all individuals from unauthorized digital replicas.
Two years ago this month.
The national version has a calendar number and no floor date
I have to correct something I believed before reading the record: the shorthand that "the federal bill is going nowhere" is half wrong, and the true half is worse.
The bill is the NO FAKES Act. Senators Blackburn, Coons, Tillis and Klobuchar, with Representatives Salazar and Dean, introduced a revised version on May 20, 2026, promising "clear guardrails that protect the creative community." On June 18 the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced it unanimously, by voice vote. Nobody objected.
Then it stopped. The Senate half has been sitting on the Legislative Calendar under General Orders since June 24 — Calendar No. 446, if you want its address — with no floor vote. Fifty-nine days, as I write. The House companion is worse: it was introduced and referred to the Judiciary Committee on the same day in May, and that is the entire history.
So the honest version is not that Congress refused. Congress agreed, unanimously, in one committee, then did not schedule the thing. The only national protection Americans have for synthetic imagery of any kind is narrow: the Federal Trade Commission began enforcing a 48-hour takedown duty for nonconsensual intimate images on May 19, 2026. That is the whole federal shelf.
The trouble with getting what you asked for
You would expect me to say Congress should copy Washington. I am not going to, and the reason sits in that same opening sentence of the statute.
Washington did not give you a shield. It gave you an asset. The chapter says the right "shall be freely transferable, assignable, and licensable, in whole or in part." Freely assignable. That is what property means — the thing can leave you.
The Copyright Office saw this coming. In the same 2024 report that diagnosed the patchwork, it recommended the federal right be "licensable, subject to guardrails, but not assignable" — rent your face out under conditions, never hand over the deed. Washington chose the other setting. That is the distance between an actor licensing a scan for one film and a nineteen-year-old signing their likeness away forever for early access to an app.
Would the federal bill then wipe Washington's answer off the board? Unresolved, and anyone who says otherwise is guessing. The reported Senate text preempts state causes of action for a digital replica in an expressive work, but carves out state statutes and common law "in existence, as of January 2, 2025," regarding a digital replica. Washington's chapter is decades older than that date; its forged-digital-likeness provisions are fourteen months younger. So which is the state statute "regarding a digital replica"? Jennifer E. Rothman, who has spent a career mapping this terrain, has written that what that phrase means is unclear, which creates a significant challenge. The bill does not answer that. It lands on it.
In fairness to the only route carrying traffic, the right of publicity could be an invaluable weapon against the worst harms of deepfakes precisely because it already exists — Michael P. Goodyear's argument in the Boston Globe last August, conditional as he made it.
Denmark tried the same idea in a different language, and hit the same wall
The comparison that changed how I think about this happened four thousand miles away, in a country of six million, and went sideways in almost the same way.
In June 2025 the Danish Ministry of Culture announced that the government and seven other parties had agreed on a shield against digital imitations carrying personal characteristics. Culture minister Jakob Engel-Schmidt put it to The Guardian as a message rather than a mechanism: everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice and their own facial features.
The instrument they reached for was copyright — not privacy, not a standalone personality statute, but an amendment to the Copyright Act itself. The European Parliament's research service, in a January 2026 briefing, called it a novel approach that would introduce new personality rights using copyright law. The amendments would require consent from the imitated person, protection lasting fifty years after death, and enforcement through the EU's Digital Services Act notice-and-action machinery rather than a courtroom. The drafters thought harder about satire than most American statutes do, exempting imitations primarily intended as caricature, satire, parody, pastiche or criticism of power unless they are misinformation likely to seriously harm others.
So why a cautionary tale rather than a model? Three reasons.
First, it is not finished. The Danish firm Plesner notes the draft was published in July 2025, consultation closed that August, Brussels was notified that October — and that "if enacted," the law was expected to come into force on July 1, 2026. If enacted is still the operative phrase. On Verfassungsblog in March 2026, Alma Eggers described Denmark as the first country in the European Union to specifically protect one's image and voice, expected in force by that month's end. The month came and went; the European Parliament briefing says July 2026 instead. The most recent accounting I could find, from May 2026, states that as of April 2026 the draft had not yet received final parliamentary adoption — and I could not confirm today that it has. Denmark proposed, Congress proposed, only Washington finished.
Second, it is not really copyright, and Denmark says so. The same briefing is blunt — the planned Danish rules "do not constitute copyright in the strict sense," and the Danish authorities, in notes annexed to the notified draft, admit they do not intend to designate a new right of copyright for citizens. Personality law in copyright's coat, because copyright already owns the enforcement plumbing.
Third — and this should stop you cold — it does not fix the geography problem either. The Danish rules, that briefing says, "would only apply to illegal content on its territory through geo-blocking" by very large online platforms and search engines; if other member states do not adopt similar rules, deepfakes imitating Danish people stay available outside Denmark. Same lottery, redrawn at a national border instead of a state line.
And the criticism is almost word for word what Washington should be hearing. Speaking to Tech Policy Press, intellectual property lawyer Luca Schirru made the structural objection — "Copyright can be transferred or sold, while personality rights are inalienable" — and Alice Lana of Creative Commons Brazil put it harder: copyright can be a trap; it can turn our bodies into consumer goods. The Amsterdam scholar P. Bernt Hugenholtz reached a related verdict — right idea, wrong legal framework — arguing any new rules should be grounded in the law of privacy rather than bolted onto authors' rights.
Copenhagen and Olympia, working independently in different legal traditions, reached the same fix and drew the same objection: call your face property, and you have made it the kind of thing that can be taken by contract.
A Tuesday in 2032, and a job she was happy to get
Picture a twenty-two-year-old you love, three weeks into her first real job. Onboarding includes a five-minute "presence capture" so the company assistant can sit in on meetings when she is double-booked. Genuinely useful. Everyone does it. Clause 14(c) grants a perpetual, transferable license to the resulting model.
Four years later a regional bank in a state she has never visited runs an ad featuring a young woman unmistakably her, endorsing a product she has never used. The vendor was acquired; the license moved with the assets, as property does.
Now count the outcomes. In Washington: three thousand dollars plus noneconomic damages, whether or not the ad earned a cent — though her own signature is the bank's first defense. In New York: whether the ad carried a conspicuous disclosure, a labeling fine rather than a remedy for her. In one of the thirty-odd states that never touched commercial likeness: a letter from a lawyer, and a shrug. Were she Danish, the clip could be geo-blocked at home and stream fine everywhere else.
Same person, same face, same ad. Four legal universes, sorted by a variable nobody consulted her about.
Where the serious people disagree, and not along the line you expect
Nearly everyone agrees the harm is real. They disagree about whether a national property right is a cure or a second disease — and that split does not track left and right.
From the civil-liberties side, the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues the federal bill would import many of the worst features of the DMCA notice-and-takedown system into a far broader range of online expression, making it easier to suppress commentary, satire and news. Public Knowledge wants the consent machinery fixed first: senior policy counsel Meredith Rose warned the day after the committee vote that the bill must still protect people from predatory, opaque "click-wrap" contracts that could result in misuse of their likenesses up to ten years after simply downloading an app.
Ten years after downloading an app. I would like to formally retract the four seconds I spent on those terms.
Rothman, from a third position, thinks the current draft could make things worse than the status quo — its preemption provision "may well be unconstitutional as drafted," and it would add another layer to what she calls the identity thicket, where overlapping laws and entitlements conflict.
From the market-oriented right the objection to patchworks is real but aimed elsewhere: a coalition organized through the R Street Institute asked Congress in January 2026 to temporarily preempt certain state AI laws, because a patchwork of state-by-state rules raises compliance costs ultimately paid by consumers — a letter about AI regulation broadly rather than digital replicas, asking for a pause rather than a permanent right. And from the pro-intellectual-property center-right, the Council for Innovation Promotion welcomed the committee vote, executive director Frank Cullen saying the group looks forward to the bill's consideration by the full Senate.
Which, again, has not happened. And nobody is pursuing the third way the Copyright Office's comment record surfaced: federal law as a floor states could exceed, rather than a ceiling that displaces them.
So what do you actually do about it?
You cannot legislate from your kitchen. You can do these:
Find the likeness clause before you upload. Any app or employer form that captures your face or voice has one. Search the terms for "likeness," "biometric," "perpetual," "sublicense" and "assign." The word that should stop you is assign — a license you can end is a rental; an assignment is a sale.
Learn which bucket your state is in. "My state has a deepfake law" and "my state protects my commercial likeness" are different sentences, and the gap between them is where most people live.
Ask the sharper question about anything already out there. Not "is this illegal" but "illegal where, and against whom" — the maker, the platform, or the advertiser. In Tennessee the platform is in frame. In much of the country it is not.
Ask your representative one specific thing. Not "what about deepfakes," but why H.R.8915 has not left House Judiciary since May, when the Senate version cleared its committee without a single objection.
Have the awkward conversation at home. Ask your parents and your kids what they would want done if a convincing fake of them turned up. A strange dinner-table topic exactly once.
Where I have landed
Washington did something genuinely brave and slightly wrong, and I would still rather have it than not.
Brave, because it named the harm, priced it, and refused to make you prove somebody profited from your humiliation. Slightly wrong, because it reached for property when what most of us want is a right we cannot be talked out of at the bottom of a scroll. The Copyright Office flagged that seam two years ago, chose the word "assignable" with care, and was overruled twice — in Olympia, and by a floor schedule.
The deeper problem is not the word. A state, any state, is the wrong size of container: a forged video does not stop at a border, and neither does a licensing agreement. Denmark is learning that one size up. The only jurisdictions large enough to match the problem are the ones not voting on it.
The bill exists. It cleared committee unanimously. It has a calendar number. Everything left is scheduling — and scheduling, in Washington D.C., is just another word for priority.
Two years ago the Copyright Office called the need urgent. Your face has been waiting on a calendar ever since.
If you got this far you almost certainly know someone who has fed their face into something for fun — a filter, an avatar app, an onboarding video. Send this to them, not as a warning but as a question worth asking before the next terms box. HAIA Foundation writes about the small print that turns into a big deal; the rest of it lives here.