American law has never quite decided what you own about yourself. Your name and image are protected in some states and barely in others, under a patchwork of right-of-publicity statutes written for an era when misappropriating a face required a camera and a printing press. A bill now sitting on the Senate calendar would replace that patchwork with something Congress has never created: a federal intellectual property right in your own voice and likeness, held by every person in the country, licensable, inheritable, and enforceable in federal court.
The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced S. 4591 — the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act of 2026, known as the NO FAKES Act — unanimously by voice vote on June 18. It is the furthest any comprehensive federal digital-replica bill has traveled, and a month later it still awaits floor time.
What the bill actually does
At its core, the NO FAKES Act creates a "digital replication right" that attaches to every individual, famous or not. Anyone who produces or distributes an unauthorized AI-generated replica of a person's voice or visual likeness in an audiovisual work or sound recording can be held liable. Online services can be liable too, if they host such a replica with knowledge that it was unauthorized.
The right does not end at death. It passes to heirs and executors, can be licensed and transferred, and — according to reporting on the committee-approved text — terminates no later than 70 years after the individual's death, a duration deliberately echoing the copyright term.
The enforcement machinery is borrowed almost wholesale from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A person who finds a replica of themselves online can send a notice demanding removal rather than immediately filing suit; platforms that comply promptly get a safe harbor. The version introduced on May 20 added a counter-notice procedure earlier drafts lacked: a poster who believes the removal was mistaken can file back, and if the complainant does not sue within 14 days, the content is restored. Knowingly filing a false counter-notice carries a $25,000 penalty per filing, or actual damages, whichever is greater. Platform-side exposure runs to $750,000 per work.
The bill carves out uses recognized as protected by the First Amendment — news reporting, parody, satire, criticism, commentary — and the May revision exempted nonprofit libraries, archives and accredited educational institutions doing non-commercial research. Preemption is asymmetric: future state digital-replica laws are blocked, but state statutes and common law in existence as of January 2, 2025 survive, which means Tennessee's ELVIS Act stands.
The coalition, and the holdouts
The endorsement list is the strangest thing about this bill. SAG-AFTRA, the AFL-CIO, the RIAA, Universal, Warner and Sony Music, the Motion Picture Association, ASCAP and the Authors Guild sit alongside YouTube, TikTok, OpenAI, IBM, Disney and Getty Images — plus RAINN and the American Medical Association. More than 30 organizations in all. Sixteen thousand SAG-AFTRA members signed an open letter urging passage.
"Rarely does legislation earn this kind of cross-sector support," said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union's national executive director. "The NO FAKES Act represents common sense, long-overdue federal protection, and Congress now has both the opportunity and the obligation to pass it."
Sponsors leaned hard on the ordinary-person framing. "Everyone deserves the right to own and protect their voice and likeness from AI deepfakes, no matter if you're Taylor Swift or an 8th grader in Wilmington," Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) said after the vote. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), his co-lead, said the bill would ensure AI does not "give scammers and online predators a free pass." Fourteen senators signed on as original co-sponsors; Representatives Maria Salazar (R-Fla.) and Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.) carry the House companion, which the House Judiciary Committee has not yet taken up.
Opposition did not come from the big platforms. It came from a coalition of civil liberties and digital rights groups — EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, the ACLU, Fight for the Future, FIRE, Public Knowledge, the R Street Institute and others — which urged the committee not to advance the bill in its current form.
The case for and the case against
The case for is straightforward and, on the harms, largely uncontested. Non-consensual sexual deepfakes, voice-cloned fraud calls, fabricated endorsements by doctors and musicians: real, growing, and poorly addressed by fifty different state regimes. A federal right with a fast removal path gives victims something short of a lawsuit they cannot afford.
The case against is about the machinery, not the goal. EFF's Joe Mullin argued that the bill "offers no protection for a platform's judgment about an often difficult question — whether a particular piece of content is satire, parody, commentary, or news. Any platform that guesses wrong faces penalties of up to $750,000 per work." The predictable equilibrium is remove-first. The coalition letter also flags a subtler problem: because the right is licensable and transferable, it can be signed away. "A background actor who signs a release on set or an ordinary person who clicks through a platform's terms of service could end up with the right to their own face and voice in someone else's hands, for years, with federal enforcement behind it."
Smaller and open-source developers add a scale objection: notice-and-removal infrastructure is a fixed cost that incumbents already have and independent hosts do not. Those concerns were audible in committee. Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) raised First Amendment objections at the markup but declined to block the bill, agreeing instead to keep working with sponsors before floor consideration.
What to watch
Three things. Whether the bill gets floor time before the August recess or slips into a fall calendar crowded by the midterms. Whether the Lee-Cruz-Schmitt bloc extracts a manager's amendment tightening the First Amendment exclusions or penalizing bad-faith takedown notices — the asymmetry between the $25,000 false-counter-notice penalty and the absence of any equivalent sanction on false removal demands is the most likely negotiating lever. And whether House Judiciary moves the Salazar-Dean companion at all. Without that, Senate passage is a press release rather than a law.
“Everyone deserves the right to own and protect their voice and likeness from AI deepfakes, no matter if you're Taylor Swift or an 8th grader in Wilmington.”— Chris Coons, U.S. Senator (D-Del.), co-lead sponsor