Face and voice as legal objects: Danish bill against DeepFake
Artificial intelligence today can create, in seconds, a video or audio recording of a real person saying or doing something they have never said or done.
In October 2026, Denmark submitted a bill to parliament that would prohibit such distribution without human consent, while in the US, singer Taylor Swift and actor Matthew McConaughey have chosen a completely different tool to solve the same problem: trademark registration.
These two approaches clearly demonstrate that legislators, lawyers, and authorized persons are looking for an answer to the same question in different legal concepts: who owns the right to a person’s face and voice, and what is the legal nature of this right? In this article, I will discuss the Danish bill, its positive aspects, and the issues that require careful assessment. I will also discuss Swift and McConaughey’s strategy and what significance these approaches may have for Georgia.
1. What does the Danish bill mean?
Denmark submitted a bill for consideration on October 8, 2026, that would prohibit distributing realistic digital imitations of a person’s face and voice without their consent. The bill would amend Danish copyright law and aim to protect both citizens and performers. In the case of performers, the protection would also include digital imitations of their performances.
The draft is based on a broad political agreement reached in June 2025, which was initiated by the then Minister of Culture, Jakob Engel-Schmidt. The draft provides for exceptions for satire, parody, caricature and criticism of the government and society. However, these exceptions do not apply to disinformation that poses a specific serious threat to the rights, essential interests, life, or property of others. The Minister of Culture cites the main goal as rapidly removing content manipulated by tech giants from their platforms to minimize the damage.
2. Legal nature: a new right, not a personal right
The peculiarity of the Danish approach is not limited to prohibition. Denmark is the first country in the European Union to seek to protect the human face and voice by introducing a new intellectual property right, based on the model of neighboring rights to copyright. In continental Europe, the face and voice have traditionally been protected by personal rights that are not transferable to another person, serve primarily as a protective function, and only partially have commercial significance. The Danish approach goes beyond this tradition and envisages a new right that may be transferred to another person and used for commercial purposes. According to the same analysis, the Danish model distinguishes between two groups: performers, who are granted specific rights in their voice and appearance, and other persons, to whom protection also applies.
This conceptual choice gives rise to conflicting assessments. On the one hand, supporters point to economic asymmetry: the copyright owner can benefit from developed mechanisms of licensing, transfer of rights, and enforcement, while in the case of personal rights it is difficult to determine the economic value, which also complicates the assessment of damage. On the other hand, critics believe that the human face is inextricably linked to his personality and that turning his intellectual property into an economic object is wrong.
However, academic commentaries emphasize that not all forms of DeepFake require the same protection mechanisms: pornographic DeepFake, above all, violates human dignity; imitation of music and films harms economic interests; political DeepFake poses a threat to society. Therefore, some authors prefer to discuss these different types of harm within the appropriate legal framework. For example, to combat disinformation, they highlight transparency obligations, which Article 50 of the EU AI Act also provides for.
3. Taylor Swift and Matthew McConaughey: Trademark as a Protection Tool
The Swift and McConaughey cases are unrelated, and neither party sought to trademark the other's voice. Both parties have independently sought to trademark their own voice and image to protect themselves from AI misuse.
On April 24, 2026, Swift's company, TAS Rights Management, filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO): two for sound marks referring to her voice ("Hey, it's Taylor Swift" and "Hey, it's Taylor"), and one for a visual mark depicting a photograph of Swift standing on stage with a pink guitar, a multicolored bodysuit, and silver boots. The applications were filed by Venable's attorney and were first noticed and reviewed by intellectual property attorney Josh Gerben, who argued that the marks were "specifically designed to protect Taylor from threats posed by artificial intelligence." Taylor Swift is one of the most famous victims of artificial intelligence abuse: pornographic fakes created using her image have been circulating online, and during the 2024 election campaign, fake materials were used to create the impression that she supported a specific candidate.
McConaughey chose this path earlier: in January 2026, his lawyers obtained eight trademarks from the USPTO, including a sound mark, his phrase "Alright, alright, alright." The registrations cover specific goods and services, including downloadable video and audiovisual recordings in the fields of self-help, spirituality, and entertainment television, as well as personal appearances of celebrities and acting services. It noted that the goal is to protect his voice and appearance from unauthorized use by artificial intelligence while also protecting his interests in developing new artificial intelligence capabilities. In 2025, McConaughey also signed an agreement with voice-cloning company ElevenLabs, which allows his voice to be replicated with artificial intelligence.
4. Does this strategy work?
Consistent with the celebrity approach, the industry sees the author as having some use value. If someone artificially replicated McConaughey’s voice and used it to sell goods or services in the same industry, trademark infringement could be a powerful weapon, giving the rightsholder the right to seek injunctions, destruction of the goods, damages, and one-time compensation. It is harder to assess cases where a DeepFake does not exactly match any registration, although registering voice and image can be a real step forward in the fight against technology.
The two approaches differ in their legal nature. The Danish bill aims to introduce a new right specifically to protect against deepfakes and requires platforms to remove the relevant content. The Swift and McConaughey approach adapts the existing legal instrument to new circumstances and focuses protection on commercial use cases. The first approach is broader, as it extends protection to non-public entities. The second is narrower and operates within the existing legal system, although in practice it is mainly available to public entities.