Sometimes I think the effect is better when they're not quite the same. You get that bizarro-world feeling. "He sort of looked like you but also not like you? It was weird."
> I wonder how that works for very similar looking people.
AFAIK, copyright allows for independent creation (unlike patents), so unless one person had deliberately copied the other's appearance, there should be no problem.
There are indeed many people that look very similar, and that will only increase if the efforts to eradicate uniqueness and actual separated diversity are successful, but there is also a lesson in the basic concept of, similar is not same. A single wrinkle more or less or a shift in an angle, and it’s not you anymore. The whole concept of likeness is a spurious one at best, akin to how the aristocracy functioned in the past where e.g., the depiction of their profile on a coin was a means of control too.
I was just recently trying to find an associate from my past with an unfortunately common whole full name in his language and was rather surprised at how many of the people depicted online with his name looked extremely similar to him, but upon closer discernment were surely not him. How do you discern that a “deepfake” (what a dumb term) is similar to you and not just similar to anyone else?
Also, what if AI is just trained with images of you? The consequent image will similarly only be an inspiration of you, not you, not the same as even using images in an attempt to graft a very similar facial feature onto an image or map it into a video.
It is in fact also what artists do in physical medium, they look at something/someone and are inspired by it to create an illusion that gives the impression of similarity, but it is not that thing/person. Will this new law possibly make art illegal too because people have not thought this through?
On a digital screen, it is of course also not you at all, it is individual pixels that fool the mind or give an illusion. It is really a pernicious muddling of reality and logic we have allowed to emerge, where the impression of depiction is the property of someone even though it is not that person, but also only if it is the means for control, ie money. Mere peasants have no control over their image taken in public.
The Sphere in Vegas is another good example of this on a large scale, each “pixel” is roughly 6” apart from the other and about 2” in diameter, for all intents and purposes separate objects, each only projecting one array of colors in a matrix of individual LEDs. Up close it looks no different than a colored LED matrix, only when you stand sufficiently far away is your mind tricked into believing you see something that is not really there.
Frankly, these moves to “protect” are very much a direct assault on free expression and even may create unintended consequences if art exceptions do not apply anymore either. Is it now illegal for me to paint a nude, how about from an image that I took of someone? What about if I do it really well from my own memory? What about if I use a modeling tool to recreate such a nude as a digital 3D object from images or even memory? Is AI not also simply a tool? Or is it more?
> How do you discern that a “deepfake” (what a dumb term) is similar to you and not just similar to anyone else?
Presumably the only reason to use a deepfake of a specific person is to produce things specifically in relation to that person. Otherwise, why bother? So “is this about the individual or just coincidence?” isn’t likely to be a factor in any complaint made. This seems like a hypothetical rather than something that is likely to need answering in practice.
You are missing the malicious intent. Maybe I simply claim that whatever you created is a “deepfake” of me and now you owe me. I’ll just assume you have heard of parent trolls? Wanted to make a very we will see AI/Deepfake trolls?
Given a large enough set of generated character there will be many that look like some real person. The cited "you" could refer to any of aesthetic collisions.
Yes, and what happens when they try to argue that somebody made a deepfake of some random person and they are asked what the motive is? Or when it goes through discovery and it’s plainly obvious deepfakes weren’t used? Courts aren’t gullible automatons.
You're right, they're not. But if it plays out anything like copyright enforcement on the web today, distribution platforms will take down more things without a whiff of court intervention.
I welcome the initiative. At the same time, there probably needs to be some kind of "freedom of panorama" exception to take and use pictures where someone's likeness just happens to be featured incidentally/in the background, like pictures of tourist attractions, public events, urban photography etc.
Otherwise everyday photography in public spaces would become legally risky or impractical, especially in crowded areas where avoiding all faces is nearly impossible and where the focus clearly isn't on the individuals but the landmark or scene itself.
The problem of filming/photographing in public is not new and this type of legislation already exists in many (all?) European countries and falls under existing privacy laws...
If a deepfake is made of someone, that person was clearly the subject of the image/video and thus violates his/her privacy.
This extra legislation would help protect in case the original image/video was taken with consent (so no privacy issue).
There are image processing techniques that can remove the people from a crowded shot, allowing you to take pictures of landmarks during the day as though there are no people around.
Taking the median pixel values of a set of photographs isn't particularly fake. You might end up with the shadows being a bit off, but not noticeably so.
I think this is great. It’s similar to the rights that brands have.
Imagine I drew a Coca Cola logo in paint. Now I own the copyright to my picture of the Coca Cola logo. Next I stick it on my new brand of soda. That’s not allowed.
Coca-cola own rights to their logo. You should own rights to your face and voice.
This is a bit of an unfortunate example because it mixes copyright law and trademark law, which are very different in their character.
I think your conclusion is correct, but the child comments mentioning fair use would not apply because fair use is a copyright concept, not a trademark concept. And I'm really only familiar with US laws, so I'm not even sure if fair use is a concept in Denmark or not. They have a different notion of copyright than we do in the US.
That said, I think Denmark did the wrong thing here. I think face and identity is much closer to a trademark than it is to something that is a created piece of artwork. Trademark law is a little bit narrower because it allows you to use the trademark to refer to the company, but it prohibits you from using the trademark to confuse customers about whether this is an authentic product. This feels quite analogous to the issue that Denmark is trying to address with the deep fakes, so I'm a little bit surprised on the copyright angle, since I can imagine a lot of legitimate uses for taking a picture of someone without needing their permission and distributing it. CCTVs, traffic cams, mug shots, police body cams, and the ever-increasing trend of recording in any situation that becomes tense or dangerous. Will a civilian be told by the cop that he's violating copyright because they want to film the interaction with the police? This reminds me of when cops would play Taylor Swift loudly in the background so that people couldn't post videos of the interaction on YouTube.
But how would that work for news reporting? Imagine a politician doing something stupid in public. Should it not be possible to broadcast that if he disallows it?
In Switzerland, where people have the legal right to control whether and how their image may be photographed and published, exemptions are made if the image/person is of public interest. This is decided on a case-by-case basis, so the news org has to be willing to argue this in court.
Let's say, as an example, a married politician having an affair with someone. Generally, news sites will publish photos with the face of the politician visible but would blur the other person. The former is clearly a person of public interest, the latter is not. Even if it's a photo taken in a public space.
Interesting concept. Case-by-case basis means that in practice only the rich and corporations have access to their exceptions, analogous to US copyright "fair use", which is on a litigated, case by case basis.
In Switzerland and probably most or all EU countries.
For example, in Spain, the schools need a signed form allowing each student's picture to be published.
The issue of money gatekeeping legal rights is another issue entirely which should be addressed for everything, not just this specific problem. It's also, in my opinion, a lot more prevalent in the US than the rest of the first world countries.
Would likely fall under fair use or an analogous right in most places. If Coca-cola does something stupid, they do not have the ability to censor depictions of their logo from reporting on it.
There is the (helpful to distinguish) 'gap' here. The media org that will report on a politician (for good or bad), will use the politician's 'news-PR-approved-actual-photo-provided-by-the-politician's-PR-team' (the serious one for war-news, the smiling one for the tax-breaks, and so on). They won't deepfake/use midjourney to create a photo of the politician eating an ice-cream while a pigeon is pooping on him (something that Colbert/Kimmel/Meyes/et al would do - clearly as a parody).
But me (not really) on my website (I don't have one) where I trash politicians (I don't) and post a photo of said politician eating poop, that should be 'frowned upon'. (Or worse to shame an ex-gf or a colleague that 'won't yield to my sexual advances').
While reading the article though, I thought of the cases where a paparazzo takes a photo of CelebrityA, then the CelebrityA posts said photo to her Insta (without getting permission from the agency) and the agency sues her. Now (in Denmark) the CelebrityA can sue the paparazzo for taking her photo in the first place (right?). This would protect people from getting uncomfortable photos.
That could come under fair use. Like if you had a coke can on film, you could broadcast it. But you could not apply the coke brand on some other product.
How do you plan on handling dopplegangers? They looks extremely similar (if not twin-like), yet they should each own the rights to their image and features.
They don't, really. At least in Germany, the "right to one's likeness" already exists as an explicit law but entirely separate from copyright and trademark law, which is what governs brand likeness.
What Denmark is proposing is simply an extension of the existing safeguards that many EU countries, as well as EU legislation generally, already provide regarding the control of their citizens over their likeness. It is not really revolutionary but a sensible addition in the light of technological advancements.
He controlled the copyright to that painting. That's transformative, and the result does not meaningfully affect Campbell's ability to trade.
Quoting that Wikipedia link: "Although Campbell's never pursued litigation against Warhol for his art, United States Supreme Court justices have stated that it is likely Warhol would have prevailed.", with two quotes from two Supreme Court cases.
The second such quote is from Neil Gorsuch: "Campbell's Soup seems to me an easy case because the purpose of the use for Andy Warhol was not to sell tomato soup in the supermarket...It was to induce a reaction from a viewer in a museum or in other settings."
On the other hand, were Warhol to stick his copyrighted images on a new brand of soup, that would violate trademark law as it would confuse buyers.
I assumed this was already the case. IIRC Elliot Page licensed his (earlier) likeliness for a 2013 game and sued another gamemaker for using it for free.
You don't have copyright on your own likeness in the same way you have copyright on an original work. However, the law does provide protection for individuals to control how their name, image, likeness, and other identifying characteristics are used, particularly for commercial purposes. This area of law is known as the right of publicity.
I'm not seeing anything new that prompted The Grauniad to report this, this week in particular. Maybe it is because it's news to Anglophones.
But Jakob Engel-Schmidt has been talking about this in the Danish news since April/May, back when two opposing political parties created a computer-generated fake video depicting Mette Frederiksen saying things that would have outraged voters.
Japan is more advanced than West in terms of privacy protection. When filming in the street, for example, for a street interview, TV typically blurs the faces of Japanese-looking people passing by (except for foreigners).
While in the West people have no respect to other people, and don't bother to blur anything. I think it would be better for everyone if you couldn't post photos of other people without their permission and if annoying Youtubers would go to jail.
Also when talking about some celebrity on TV they often show a drawing if they could not obtain rights to a photo.
> When filming in the street, for example, for a street interview, TV typically blurs the faces of Japanese-looking people passing by (except for foreigners).
While in the West people have no respect to other people,
Am I missing something or is this just plain racism? There are lots of japanese people who don't look japanese, foreigners who are permanent residents, and japanese-looking people that aren't japanese - how is it respectful to protect just a certain ethnic groups privacy?
It's not racist. It's all about the intention; as a company, you don't want to expend a single extra dime to comply with the regulations. since the population is pretty much homogeneous you can just blur out the Japanese and you are pretty much guaranteed to cover 99% of the cases.
Business don't exist to respect or care about people they exist to generate profit so the idea of a business "respecting" something is not even realistic.
The law is what outlines what are the limits and guarantees the basics rights to everyone.
So, people are being treated differently entirely on the basis of their race - but it's not racist because they're lazily cutting corners in following a regulation? If they actually cared why would they not just blur all faces instead of looking at their race to decide whether or not to do it?
> Business don't exist to respect or care about people they exist to generate profit so the idea of a business "respecting" something is not even realistic.
People work at businesses, and those people make decisions that are influenced by their personal feelings. In a free market people will boycott them for doing bad things. Racist businesses being outted, receiving bad press and losing revenue - in this scenario it sounds like the japanese are okay with it. Being respectful is profitable.
And what about visitors to the country? Do visitors get treated with more respect than strangers? In foreign cultures, they do. So this analogy doesn’t follow through.
I try not to litter. I even pick up litter when I see it. Does the existence of serial rapists mean I shouldn't bother? Should we never worry about moderating our own behavior if anyone else out there is worse?
>While in the West people have no respect to other people
Big overgeneralization. Here in Germany the "Recht am Eigenen Bild" (literally right to your own image) has existed for decades, and similar to Japan publishing images of others has some pretty big limitations and without consent is usually restricted to places or persons of public interest. To the chagrin of Google Street view or Twitch streamers
I think that's rather silly. If it's a public place, and I have the right to be there and see all these faces with my eyes, why can't I exercise this right mediated by a camera?
> While in the West people have no respect to other people, and don't bother to blur anything. I think it would be better for everyone if you couldn't post photos of other people without their permission and if annoying Youtubers would go to jail.
Every burglars wet dream. I have no idea what crime is like in Japan but in EU this is not an option.
I am not sure but probably you can show a recording to police. But not post it online. Also punishment for burglary can be pretty heavy so better choose some other country.
As an example, in Spain it is illegal to have dashcams, and its content cannot be used in a trial - but you can share the content with insurances and policeman, and recording is generally not prosecuted. It is nonetheless an opening if an officer is searching for a way to fine you...
Please show a source for that claim. Afaik having the dashcam is legal (under conditions like it being mounted securely, not obstructing vision, recording limits so it's not surveillance,...) but publishing the video might violate data protection laws
I stand corrected, what is illegal is to operate them continuously, not to just have them as I simplified above.
"If, for example, you use a continuous recording of the road in which other vehicles' license plates are visible to defend yourself against a traffic ticket, you could be violating data protection, a serious offense that could be punishable by a fine of up to 300,000 euros."
I don't understand what you're saying? Are you saying that the only reason people don't do crime is because of a lack of privacy? That's patently nonsensical.
For the sake of argument, why wouldn't this also extend to my written 'voice'?
(I'm talking philosophically by the way, not legally)
For someone like Cormac McCarthy, whose sparse punctuation, biblical cadences, and apocalyptic imagery create an unmistakable "voice," the argument seems strong. His style is as identifiable as vocal timbre e.g. readers recognize McCarthy prose instantly, just as they'd recognize his speaking voice.
I guess philosophically speaking, it is pretty rare for an individual to develop a written "voice"/style distinct enough to warrant this kind of protection. Not least because only very few people would ever be able to mistake a "fake" of your written style for the real thing (because very few would be familiar with your style in the first place) and even if this happened, the likely consequences are almost always negligible. It's simply an edge case and any solution to it that I can think of would produce more problems than it solves.
Your likeness on the other hand is pretty unique for most people in the world and the technological ability to produce convincing and arbitrary copies of it has very obvious and frightful consequences. Resolving this problem is of tremendous importance for social cohesion.
My complaint is that the article makes no mention of these details.
Is it a moral right which cannot be transferred? Is there a time limit? Does it expire upon death? If not, who inherits the right?
Or is it more like an economic right, which may be transferred?
Or is the author using "copyright" in a very broad and non-legal sense?
California, for example, has laws concerning the misappropriation of likeness, but these are not copyright laws.
Does the proposed Danish law allow deepfake use by consent, and what counts as consent? If clause §123/43.b of the Microsoft MacGoogleMeta user agreement says "by agreeing to this service you allow us to make and distribute deepfakes" - does that count as consent?
I was also confused by the word copyright. Because when we think about videos and picutures taken in public. Most of the countries have a law that divide, what is public and what is private. You basically own pictures that are took from you by others in private and also in public to a certain state.
My take is, that Denmark wants to implement this not only for visuals (like videos and picture), but also for behaviour.
It sounds like a good idea, but I can imagine the implementation can be quite difficult. If I look exactly like another person, who has the right to decide what I can do with my own image?
Person A will have the rights to their image, person B to theirs. If person A looks like person B, person B still has no say in what person A does with their image and vice versa. Seems obvious to me.
I guess you worry about stuff like person A looks like celebrity person B and sells their image for, say, frosty frootloop commercials. As long as A is not impersonating B, ie. claiming to be B, I can't see a problem. "Hi, my name is Troy McClure, you may know me for looking like Serena Williams." I guess it will be the decade of the doppelgänger agencies, like in Double Trouble ;) [1]
I imagine both of you would have the power to license out your likeness.
Same situation as today: if you have a lookalike out there who does pornography, and somebody you know runs across it, they'll think it's you and not much you can do about that except explain.
Unfortunately, the law is already quite stupid around this.
There have been many cases where a company wanted to hire say, actor X to voice their commercial, actor refused, so they hired someone else with a nearly identical voice, the original actor sued and won(!!!!!) because apparently it's their "signature" voice.
I disagree because obviously that means the other person has no right to make money using their voice now, at no fault of their own?
But yeah I'd imagine you'd have the same problem here - you can't generate a picture of say, Brad Pitt even if you say well actually this isn't Brad Pitt, it's just a person who happens to look exactly like him(which is obviously entirely possible and could happen).
Yeah, but those cases hinged on the fact that the ad company tried to hire the actor first, thus demonstrating intent of using this actor. Had they hired Nearly Identical Voice directly they probably would not have lost.
These cases generally are not about just someone that happened to sound the same, but someone who was choosen specifically and directed to sound like the imitated person. Even explicitly looking for similarity is generally fine, calls for voice actors will include references to well-known VAs as "the sort of thing we are looking for", only imitation is going to far.
(In music, some other cases have been about suspected misuse of actual recordings, e.g. a cover band being sued because the original musician believes they actually used one of their recordings, and disproving that can be tricky. I don't think that can as easily happen with look-alikes)
The same problem applies to regular copyright. Different people will make similar, maybe even identical, works fairly often. So probably a similar solution? Not sure. The wrinkle being you can't exactly change your own features.
Ironically I could see that idea being used in "hard authoritarian" style: a state could require that people MUST have distinct and uniquely registered faces to allow tracking via facial recognition.
Curious how enforceable it'll be in practice though. If the platforms don't play ball or the content is hosted elsewhere, the legal teeth might get dull fast
E.U. lawmakers (including those in the individual nation states like Denmark) and judges generally can get quite nasty if they want to. Just look at Apple (a U.S. company and the richest one at that) getting systematically bent of a barrel by the E.U. commission.
Hosting your stuff outside the E.U. does not really protect you from this. More likely than not, your content relies on other companies (host, ISP, etc.) to be delivered to your audience and those companies either do have a presence in the E.U. or want to retain a working relationship with E.U. authorities. It's simply a question of how much energy E.U. authorities would be willing to invest in enforcement.
In France we have a ‘right to the image’ where you have a right to stop someone taking your photo or having a photo of you published. People who contravene the rules can be punished with fines or more.
From Wikipedia: "Public figures can be photographed as part of their function or professional activity... A photograph of a public figure taken as part of his private life therefore still requires explicit authorization for publication. Thus, the Prime Minister cannot oppose a journalist photographing him at the exit of the Council of Ministers or during an official lunch, but he can prohibit the publication of photographs representing him at an event in his private life, such as a family reunion.”
The proposed legislation is specific to deepfakes, i.e. artificially generated images of real persons.
For actual photographs of real persons Denmark and many other E.U. countries already have a broad system of legislation that governs your right to your own likeness. It usually assumes that it would be illegal to take and/or publish an image of a random person in a place/during an activity where they would have a reasonable expectation of privacy (i.e. in their backyard) or that was taken in a manner explicitly designed to circumvent reasonable precautions to ensure privacy.
This is counteracted by the public interest, which can cover certain activities of public persons (i.e. a prominent politician having an affair) or public activities of random persons (i.e. you taking part in a protest march). It's decided on a case by case basis based on quite detailed laws and decades of jurisprudence.
How do these changes make sense being included into existing copyright law, as opposed to dedicated personality rights law? What is the original and creative work being copied? Is the idea that someone simply existing and doing mundane everyday activities such as walking their dog down around the park is performing an original and creative work as themselves on a daily basis with a likeness that others cannot derive their own performance of until 70 years after the person's death? If they increase the original and creative nature of their performance by wearing sunglasses with one rectangular pink frame with green lens, and a circular blue frame with yellow lens, and put on a clown wig, does this make their performance of walking a dog around the park creative enough to be copyrightable?
Is a Donald Trump impersonator (example[1]) copying the creative performance of Donald Trump (president)? What if someone did intend to create deepfakes of Donald Trump (president) and instead of using an image or audio of Donald Trump (president) as source material, use the Donald Trump impersonator as the source material?
There is no creativity involved whatsoever. Plenty of people look similar enough that they share "copyrighted" features. Cartoons of prominent people = copyright infringement? (Europe has a long history of judgments and precedents that prominent people can be parodied etc., how will that square with a fancy copyright protection.) You can principially make money on your copyright, so if a twin "sells" their face rights and the other twin demands a share, then what?
Just make deepfakes a specific crime and do not mess with IP any further. It is already a mess.
interesting idea.. i like it.
question tho, what happens if your features change... so say you have an accident and gain a scar or disfigurment. does that mean that your pre-disfigurement image is no longer copyrighted? or is your image for your whole life and at every stage of your life is copyrighted?
Public photography? does this mean your image cant be sold if take in public? I'm sure there are many other scenarios that would be interesting to argue about as well.
All of this has been resolved already. In Germany, as in many other E.U. countries, you have a "right to your own likeness" that covers all of your likenesses, no matter what age.
This right is restricted for people of public interest. An important politician might be an "absolute" person of public interest and as long as they remain in their public position, certain private acts might still be judged to be in the public interest to be documented and published.
But anybody can become a "relative" person of public interest. I.e. you were one of the people climbing the Berlin Wall during the night that it fell. If you get your picture taken at that point in time, there is an obvious public interest in publishing it. But just because you participated in this one public event, a reporter can't snap your picture and publish it a week later.
There is also an exception for "panorama" images, i.e. a person being in an image of a public place "by chance". In that scenario the person isn't allowed to be the main subject, their presence must be circumstantial.
All of this has been hashed out over decades by lawmakers and courts and it is quite easy to understand if you read up on it even a tiny bit. A common sense approach will get you 95% there.
Like Arnie wouldn't allow his likeness in the C64 predator game (Which also had backstory not in the movie, blew my mind, games could build on movies and actors had rights to the likeness of a movie character they were)
Does this mean corporation's can't CCTV me like I can't film in a theater?
A lot of problems with this, and the real privacy benefits won't be enforced, we will see what happens.
Which, implicitly, also means that the State now has the right to "give" the copy-right to one's own features. Which, implicitly, also means that now the same State has the right to "get back" / retrieve the copy-right to one's own features, after all it was the State that gave it away in the first place. Absolute bleak world.
You're taking a very ethnocentric view towards this. Most European cultures don't have the same legal culture that the US has.
Punitive damages are very rare or non-existent depending on the country and the loser of the case usually has to pay the winning party's legal fees. There just isn't the incentive to sue someone over something silly like what you've mentioned.
That has nothing to do with promoting progress and creativity, and all to do with privacy. Remember that photographs of people already have copyright protection. Why did they lump a privacy law into copyright? It's already dysfunctional as it is.
We moved past content scarcity decades ago and we are squarely in the attention scarcity regime. We use copyright against itself to have open source. We prefer interactivity and collaboration, as in open source, social networks or online games. Copyright stands in the path of collaboration and interaction.
Will companies now need to license "the likeness" of people too? Will "likeness" be property to be sold or rented?
- either the famous person cannot use their look if a lookalike refuses to agree
- or they have to pay all lookalikes to use their own image
- or the lookalikes get less protection under this law
- a person might lose their look-rights if they change their appearance to look like someone else
- someone who wants to go into acting might not get hired if they look too much like a famous actor
I don't know how to tell you this, but Denmark is a sovereign state and does not derive its interpretation and objectives of copyright from the US constitution.
You keep saying what "we" prefer, but I wasn't aware that everyone shared the same values around privacy. Some cultures take it much more seriously than others, often in ways you wouldn't expect if you're coming from e.g. the US.
I wonder how that works for very similar looking people.
There's one photographer, François Brunelle, who has a project where he takes pictures of doppelgängers: http://www.francoisbrunelle.com/webn/e-project.html
This is very odd. Hardly any of them look alike let alone doppelgänger status...
It is just a sample, IIRC, he has done a couple of hundred of those.
Some more examples
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/10/14/francois-brunelle...
https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1cimhns/canadian_...
Sometimes I think the effect is better when they're not quite the same. You get that bizarro-world feeling. "He sort of looked like you but also not like you? It was weird."
Twins become a big legal issue, then
Fascinating. I wonder how he finds them?
"He’s spent nearly 25 years locating pairs of these identical strangers and inviting them into his studios"
Dunno. Grit?
> I wonder how that works for very similar looking people.
AFAIK, copyright allows for independent creation (unlike patents), so unless one person had deliberately copied the other's appearance, there should be no problem.
Suddenly Mystique from the X-Men looks like being an expensive superpower …
To me #3 sort of looks similar, but everybody else is clearly not close to similar.
[dead]
This reminds me of conspiracy theories about famous people having doubles.
Its true... :-) https://i0.wp.com/vid.alarabiya.net/images/2017/05/09/abeaa9...?
There are indeed many people that look very similar, and that will only increase if the efforts to eradicate uniqueness and actual separated diversity are successful, but there is also a lesson in the basic concept of, similar is not same. A single wrinkle more or less or a shift in an angle, and it’s not you anymore. The whole concept of likeness is a spurious one at best, akin to how the aristocracy functioned in the past where e.g., the depiction of their profile on a coin was a means of control too.
I was just recently trying to find an associate from my past with an unfortunately common whole full name in his language and was rather surprised at how many of the people depicted online with his name looked extremely similar to him, but upon closer discernment were surely not him. How do you discern that a “deepfake” (what a dumb term) is similar to you and not just similar to anyone else?
Also, what if AI is just trained with images of you? The consequent image will similarly only be an inspiration of you, not you, not the same as even using images in an attempt to graft a very similar facial feature onto an image or map it into a video.
It is in fact also what artists do in physical medium, they look at something/someone and are inspired by it to create an illusion that gives the impression of similarity, but it is not that thing/person. Will this new law possibly make art illegal too because people have not thought this through?
On a digital screen, it is of course also not you at all, it is individual pixels that fool the mind or give an illusion. It is really a pernicious muddling of reality and logic we have allowed to emerge, where the impression of depiction is the property of someone even though it is not that person, but also only if it is the means for control, ie money. Mere peasants have no control over their image taken in public.
The Sphere in Vegas is another good example of this on a large scale, each “pixel” is roughly 6” apart from the other and about 2” in diameter, for all intents and purposes separate objects, each only projecting one array of colors in a matrix of individual LEDs. Up close it looks no different than a colored LED matrix, only when you stand sufficiently far away is your mind tricked into believing you see something that is not really there.
Frankly, these moves to “protect” are very much a direct assault on free expression and even may create unintended consequences if art exceptions do not apply anymore either. Is it now illegal for me to paint a nude, how about from an image that I took of someone? What about if I do it really well from my own memory? What about if I use a modeling tool to recreate such a nude as a digital 3D object from images or even memory? Is AI not also simply a tool? Or is it more?
> How do you discern that a “deepfake” (what a dumb term) is similar to you and not just similar to anyone else?
Presumably the only reason to use a deepfake of a specific person is to produce things specifically in relation to that person. Otherwise, why bother? So “is this about the individual or just coincidence?” isn’t likely to be a factor in any complaint made. This seems like a hypothetical rather than something that is likely to need answering in practice.
You are missing the malicious intent. Maybe I simply claim that whatever you created is a “deepfake” of me and now you owe me. I’ll just assume you have heard of parent trolls? Wanted to make a very we will see AI/Deepfake trolls?
You presume both too much and not enough.
> Maybe I simply claim that whatever you created is a “deepfake” of me and now you owe me.
How are you going to do that unless it actually looks like you?
Given a large enough set of generated character there will be many that look like some real person. The cited "you" could refer to any of aesthetic collisions.
Yes, and what happens when they try to argue that somebody made a deepfake of some random person and they are asked what the motive is? Or when it goes through discovery and it’s plainly obvious deepfakes weren’t used? Courts aren’t gullible automatons.
You're right, they're not. But if it plays out anything like copyright enforcement on the web today, distribution platforms will take down more things without a whiff of court intervention.
The amazing thing is that we have different countries and they can all do their own thing.
Then we see how they’re doing and decide - hey let’s not be like them.
I welcome the initiative. At the same time, there probably needs to be some kind of "freedom of panorama" exception to take and use pictures where someone's likeness just happens to be featured incidentally/in the background, like pictures of tourist attractions, public events, urban photography etc.
Otherwise everyday photography in public spaces would become legally risky or impractical, especially in crowded areas where avoiding all faces is nearly impossible and where the focus clearly isn't on the individuals but the landmark or scene itself.
The problem of filming/photographing in public is not new and this type of legislation already exists in many (all?) European countries and falls under existing privacy laws...
If a deepfake is made of someone, that person was clearly the subject of the image/video and thus violates his/her privacy. This extra legislation would help protect in case the original image/video was taken with consent (so no privacy issue).
There are image processing techniques that can remove the people from a crowded shot, allowing you to take pictures of landmarks during the day as though there are no people around.
Yes, but this is also fake.
Taking the median pixel values of a set of photographs isn't particularly fake. You might end up with the shadows being a bit off, but not noticeably so.
I think this is great. It’s similar to the rights that brands have.
Imagine I drew a Coca Cola logo in paint. Now I own the copyright to my picture of the Coca Cola logo. Next I stick it on my new brand of soda. That’s not allowed.
Coca-cola own rights to their logo. You should own rights to your face and voice.
This is a bit of an unfortunate example because it mixes copyright law and trademark law, which are very different in their character.
I think your conclusion is correct, but the child comments mentioning fair use would not apply because fair use is a copyright concept, not a trademark concept. And I'm really only familiar with US laws, so I'm not even sure if fair use is a concept in Denmark or not. They have a different notion of copyright than we do in the US.
That said, I think Denmark did the wrong thing here. I think face and identity is much closer to a trademark than it is to something that is a created piece of artwork. Trademark law is a little bit narrower because it allows you to use the trademark to refer to the company, but it prohibits you from using the trademark to confuse customers about whether this is an authentic product. This feels quite analogous to the issue that Denmark is trying to address with the deep fakes, so I'm a little bit surprised on the copyright angle, since I can imagine a lot of legitimate uses for taking a picture of someone without needing their permission and distributing it. CCTVs, traffic cams, mug shots, police body cams, and the ever-increasing trend of recording in any situation that becomes tense or dangerous. Will a civilian be told by the cop that he's violating copyright because they want to film the interaction with the police? This reminds me of when cops would play Taylor Swift loudly in the background so that people couldn't post videos of the interaction on YouTube.
But how would that work for news reporting? Imagine a politician doing something stupid in public. Should it not be possible to broadcast that if he disallows it?
In Switzerland, where people have the legal right to control whether and how their image may be photographed and published, exemptions are made if the image/person is of public interest. This is decided on a case-by-case basis, so the news org has to be willing to argue this in court.
Let's say, as an example, a married politician having an affair with someone. Generally, news sites will publish photos with the face of the politician visible but would blur the other person. The former is clearly a person of public interest, the latter is not. Even if it's a photo taken in a public space.
Interesting concept. Case-by-case basis means that in practice only the rich and corporations have access to their exceptions, analogous to US copyright "fair use", which is on a litigated, case by case basis.
In Switzerland and probably most or all EU countries. For example, in Spain, the schools need a signed form allowing each student's picture to be published.
The issue of money gatekeeping legal rights is another issue entirely which should be addressed for everything, not just this specific problem. It's also, in my opinion, a lot more prevalent in the US than the rest of the first world countries.
Would likely fall under fair use or an analogous right in most places. If Coca-cola does something stupid, they do not have the ability to censor depictions of their logo from reporting on it.
Probably worth noting that "fair use" is a concept based in US law and jurisprudence. The law in many EU jurisdictions works quite differently.
This isn’t about real photos of things that actually happened. This is about AI generated imagery.
So it’s not a photo of a politician doing something bad. It’s an AI recreation of what they are alleged to have done.
The law does have to be written very carefully.
Slander is already illegal no? Not that it stops all kinds of smear campaigns and alternative truths.
Think of that like reproducing a particularly ill-conceived Coca Cola advertisement.
Then, when someone uses their face to promote something, someone else can repeat the face with what it promotes.
So I think the whole thing actually works in this particular case.
It works the same way as news currently does. You can report on people, but you can't take a picture of someone and use it as your brand's model/logo.
But you mostly already couldn't do that, right?
What specific behaviors does this forbid that weren't already forbidden?
There is the (helpful to distinguish) 'gap' here. The media org that will report on a politician (for good or bad), will use the politician's 'news-PR-approved-actual-photo-provided-by-the-politician's-PR-team' (the serious one for war-news, the smiling one for the tax-breaks, and so on). They won't deepfake/use midjourney to create a photo of the politician eating an ice-cream while a pigeon is pooping on him (something that Colbert/Kimmel/Meyes/et al would do - clearly as a parody).
But me (not really) on my website (I don't have one) where I trash politicians (I don't) and post a photo of said politician eating poop, that should be 'frowned upon'. (Or worse to shame an ex-gf or a colleague that 'won't yield to my sexual advances').
While reading the article though, I thought of the cases where a paparazzo takes a photo of CelebrityA, then the CelebrityA posts said photo to her Insta (without getting permission from the agency) and the agency sues her. Now (in Denmark) the CelebrityA can sue the paparazzo for taking her photo in the first place (right?). This would protect people from getting uncomfortable photos.
That could come under fair use. Like if you had a coke can on film, you could broadcast it. But you could not apply the coke brand on some other product.
How do you plan on handling dopplegangers? They looks extremely similar (if not twin-like), yet they should each own the rights to their image and features.
Not sure why you're downvoted, it's an entirely valid question.
What we'll probably see is, celebrity look-alikes will be contacted to license out their own "features".
It's kind of wild that brands have had more robust protections than actual people when it comes to identity
They don't, really. At least in Germany, the "right to one's likeness" already exists as an explicit law but entirely separate from copyright and trademark law, which is what governs brand likeness.
What Denmark is proposing is simply an extension of the existing safeguards that many EU countries, as well as EU legislation generally, already provide regarding the control of their citizens over their likeness. It is not really revolutionary but a sensible addition in the light of technological advancements.
You must distinguish between copyright and trademark.
Andy Warhol drew images of Campbell's soup cans in paint. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_Soup_Cans
He controlled the copyright to that painting. That's transformative, and the result does not meaningfully affect Campbell's ability to trade.
Quoting that Wikipedia link: "Although Campbell's never pursued litigation against Warhol for his art, United States Supreme Court justices have stated that it is likely Warhol would have prevailed.", with two quotes from two Supreme Court cases.
The second such quote is from Neil Gorsuch: "Campbell's Soup seems to me an easy case because the purpose of the use for Andy Warhol was not to sell tomato soup in the supermarket...It was to induce a reaction from a viewer in a museum or in other settings."
On the other hand, were Warhol to stick his copyrighted images on a new brand of soup, that would violate trademark law as it would confuse buyers.
I assumed this was already the case. IIRC Elliot Page licensed his (earlier) likeliness for a 2013 game and sued another gamemaker for using it for free.
You don't have copyright on your own likeness in the same way you have copyright on an original work. However, the law does provide protection for individuals to control how their name, image, likeness, and other identifying characteristics are used, particularly for commercial purposes. This area of law is known as the right of publicity.
https://rinckerlaw.com/name-image-and-likeness-how-to-protec...
I'm not seeing anything new that prompted The Grauniad to report this, this week in particular. Maybe it is because it's news to Anglophones.
But Jakob Engel-Schmidt has been talking about this in the Danish news since April/May, back when two opposing political parties created a computer-generated fake video depicting Mette Frederiksen saying things that would have outraged voters.
Japan is more advanced than West in terms of privacy protection. When filming in the street, for example, for a street interview, TV typically blurs the faces of Japanese-looking people passing by (except for foreigners).
While in the West people have no respect to other people, and don't bother to blur anything. I think it would be better for everyone if you couldn't post photos of other people without their permission and if annoying Youtubers would go to jail.
Also when talking about some celebrity on TV they often show a drawing if they could not obtain rights to a photo.
> When filming in the street, for example, for a street interview, TV typically blurs the faces of Japanese-looking people passing by (except for foreigners). While in the West people have no respect to other people,
Am I missing something or is this just plain racism? There are lots of japanese people who don't look japanese, foreigners who are permanent residents, and japanese-looking people that aren't japanese - how is it respectful to protect just a certain ethnic groups privacy?
It's not racist. It's all about the intention; as a company, you don't want to expend a single extra dime to comply with the regulations. since the population is pretty much homogeneous you can just blur out the Japanese and you are pretty much guaranteed to cover 99% of the cases.
Business don't exist to respect or care about people they exist to generate profit so the idea of a business "respecting" something is not even realistic.
The law is what outlines what are the limits and guarantees the basics rights to everyone.
So, people are being treated differently entirely on the basis of their race - but it's not racist because they're lazily cutting corners in following a regulation? If they actually cared why would they not just blur all faces instead of looking at their race to decide whether or not to do it?
> Business don't exist to respect or care about people they exist to generate profit so the idea of a business "respecting" something is not even realistic.
People work at businesses, and those people make decisions that are influenced by their personal feelings. In a free market people will boycott them for doing bad things. Racist businesses being outted, receiving bad press and losing revenue - in this scenario it sounds like the japanese are okay with it. Being respectful is profitable.
[flagged]
And what about visitors to the country? Do visitors get treated with more respect than strangers? In foreign cultures, they do. So this analogy doesn’t follow through.
Foreigners don't blur faces so their faces also don't get blurred. Fair.
I'd guess so judging by the downvotes.
It should be edited to avoid snarkiness.
Yes. The West likes flagellating itself for being racist, but in [current year] the rest of the world is invariably much more racist.
I try not to litter. I even pick up litter when I see it. Does the existence of serial rapists mean I shouldn't bother? Should we never worry about moderating our own behavior if anyone else out there is worse?
Great point, except I didn't say anything like what you are implying I said.
It's easy: if you don't look Japanese, then you are not Japanese. A paper signed by someone in the government doesn’t make you Japanese.
Ok, so you're agreeing that it is "plain racism".
> A paper signed by someone in the government doesn’t make you Japanese.
You claim that the government of Japan does not have the power to bestow citizenship on individuals?
>While in the West people have no respect to other people
Big overgeneralization. Here in Germany the "Recht am Eigenen Bild" (literally right to your own image) has existed for decades, and similar to Japan publishing images of others has some pretty big limitations and without consent is usually restricted to places or persons of public interest. To the chagrin of Google Street view or Twitch streamers
It’s more generally known as personality rights / right to publicity and a lot of western countries have laws relating to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
I think that's rather silly. If it's a public place, and I have the right to be there and see all these faces with my eyes, why can't I exercise this right mediated by a camera?
Because people don't want to be posted online and you should respect that. Seeing and posting online is different.
If you don't want to be filmed in public, don't go out in public, or cover your face with a mask.
It is difficult to survive without going outside but it is easy not to film random people or blur them (AI could do this for you).
Is this a law in Japan or common curtoeusy? IN the West, the law is if you are in public, there is no expectation of privacy.
> Japan is more advanced than West in terms of privacy protection
Please stop confusing the US / maybe UK, Canada, Australia, NZ with "the West".
Countries like Germany and France have very strong privacy protections.
[dead]
> While in the West people have no respect to other people, and don't bother to blur anything. I think it would be better for everyone if you couldn't post photos of other people without their permission and if annoying Youtubers would go to jail.
Every burglars wet dream. I have no idea what crime is like in Japan but in EU this is not an option.
I am not sure but probably you can show a recording to police. But not post it online. Also punishment for burglary can be pretty heavy so better choose some other country.
As an example, in Spain it is illegal to have dashcams, and its content cannot be used in a trial - but you can share the content with insurances and policeman, and recording is generally not prosecuted. It is nonetheless an opening if an officer is searching for a way to fine you...
Please show a source for that claim. Afaik having the dashcam is legal (under conditions like it being mounted securely, not obstructing vision, recording limits so it's not surveillance,...) but publishing the video might violate data protection laws
I stand corrected, what is illegal is to operate them continuously, not to just have them as I simplified above.
"If, for example, you use a continuous recording of the road in which other vehicles' license plates are visible to defend yourself against a traffic ticket, you could be violating data protection, a serious offense that could be punishable by a fine of up to 300,000 euros."
https://www.race.es/camara-para-coche
I don't understand what you're saying? Are you saying that the only reason people don't do crime is because of a lack of privacy? That's patently nonsensical.
For the sake of argument, why wouldn't this also extend to my written 'voice'?
(I'm talking philosophically by the way, not legally)
For someone like Cormac McCarthy, whose sparse punctuation, biblical cadences, and apocalyptic imagery create an unmistakable "voice," the argument seems strong. His style is as identifiable as vocal timbre e.g. readers recognize McCarthy prose instantly, just as they'd recognize his speaking voice.
I guess philosophically speaking, it is pretty rare for an individual to develop a written "voice"/style distinct enough to warrant this kind of protection. Not least because only very few people would ever be able to mistake a "fake" of your written style for the real thing (because very few would be familiar with your style in the first place) and even if this happened, the likely consequences are almost always negligible. It's simply an edge case and any solution to it that I can think of would produce more problems than it solves.
Your likeness on the other hand is pretty unique for most people in the world and the technological ability to produce convincing and arbitrary copies of it has very obvious and frightful consequences. Resolving this problem is of tremendous importance for social cohesion.
Is this the sort of copyright where ownership can be sold or transferred? The article didn't explain how this works.
If you sell the copyright, does that mean you can no longer look like yourself?
Non exclusive license? This might be useful to actors if someone generates video of them too.
Usually in Europe, there is no copyleft. Copyright can not be sold. Only the right of use.
My complaint is that the article makes no mention of these details.
Is it a moral right which cannot be transferred? Is there a time limit? Does it expire upon death? If not, who inherits the right?
Or is it more like an economic right, which may be transferred?
Or is the author using "copyright" in a very broad and non-legal sense?
California, for example, has laws concerning the misappropriation of likeness, but these are not copyright laws.
Does the proposed Danish law allow deepfake use by consent, and what counts as consent? If clause §123/43.b of the Microsoft MacGoogleMeta user agreement says "by agreeing to this service you allow us to make and distribute deepfakes" - does that count as consent?
I was also confused by the word copyright. Because when we think about videos and picutures taken in public. Most of the countries have a law that divide, what is public and what is private. You basically own pictures that are took from you by others in private and also in public to a certain state. My take is, that Denmark wants to implement this not only for visuals (like videos and picture), but also for behaviour.
Presumably non fungible …
It sounds like a good idea, but I can imagine the implementation can be quite difficult. If I look exactly like another person, who has the right to decide what I can do with my own image?
Person A will have the rights to their image, person B to theirs. If person A looks like person B, person B still has no say in what person A does with their image and vice versa. Seems obvious to me.
I guess you worry about stuff like person A looks like celebrity person B and sells their image for, say, frosty frootloop commercials. As long as A is not impersonating B, ie. claiming to be B, I can't see a problem. "Hi, my name is Troy McClure, you may know me for looking like Serena Williams." I guess it will be the decade of the doppelgänger agencies, like in Double Trouble ;) [1]
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087481/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_1_tt_8...
I imagine both of you would have the power to license out your likeness.
Same situation as today: if you have a lookalike out there who does pornography, and somebody you know runs across it, they'll think it's you and not much you can do about that except explain.
We live under a copyright regime where four notes is enough to be an infringing musical work.
Dollars to doughnuts that this law is used against people not misrepresenting themselves, who happen to look like famous people.
I mean that you wouldn't be able to "infringe" since you are also an owner.
Unfortunately, the law is already quite stupid around this.
There have been many cases where a company wanted to hire say, actor X to voice their commercial, actor refused, so they hired someone else with a nearly identical voice, the original actor sued and won(!!!!!) because apparently it's their "signature" voice.
I disagree because obviously that means the other person has no right to make money using their voice now, at no fault of their own?
But yeah I'd imagine you'd have the same problem here - you can't generate a picture of say, Brad Pitt even if you say well actually this isn't Brad Pitt, it's just a person who happens to look exactly like him(which is obviously entirely possible and could happen).
Yeah, but those cases hinged on the fact that the ad company tried to hire the actor first, thus demonstrating intent of using this actor. Had they hired Nearly Identical Voice directly they probably would not have lost.
These cases generally are not about just someone that happened to sound the same, but someone who was choosen specifically and directed to sound like the imitated person. Even explicitly looking for similarity is generally fine, calls for voice actors will include references to well-known VAs as "the sort of thing we are looking for", only imitation is going to far.
(In music, some other cases have been about suspected misuse of actual recordings, e.g. a cover band being sued because the original musician believes they actually used one of their recordings, and disproving that can be tricky. I don't think that can as easily happen with look-alikes)
The same problem applies to regular copyright. Different people will make similar, maybe even identical, works fairly often. So probably a similar solution? Not sure. The wrinkle being you can't exactly change your own features.
Not with that attitude you can't.
Ironically I could see that idea being used in "hard authoritarian" style: a state could require that people MUST have distinct and uniquely registered faces to allow tracking via facial recognition.
There is always outlier (i look like someone) in anything. However this universal approach is a win for the people.
It works both ways. You’d have to find compromise.
The State does. The same State which now has an extra-power over its subjects.
Curious how enforceable it'll be in practice though. If the platforms don't play ball or the content is hosted elsewhere, the legal teeth might get dull fast
E.U. lawmakers (including those in the individual nation states like Denmark) and judges generally can get quite nasty if they want to. Just look at Apple (a U.S. company and the richest one at that) getting systematically bent of a barrel by the E.U. commission.
Hosting your stuff outside the E.U. does not really protect you from this. More likely than not, your content relies on other companies (host, ISP, etc.) to be delivered to your audience and those companies either do have a presence in the E.U. or want to retain a working relationship with E.U. authorities. It's simply a question of how much energy E.U. authorities would be willing to invest in enforcement.
Not sure I understand how this would work with, say, a photograph of a person. Does the photographer own the copyright, or the photographed?
In France we have a ‘right to the image’ where you have a right to stop someone taking your photo or having a photo of you published. People who contravene the rules can be punished with fines or more.
From Wikipedia: "Public figures can be photographed as part of their function or professional activity... A photograph of a public figure taken as part of his private life therefore still requires explicit authorization for publication. Thus, the Prime Minister cannot oppose a journalist photographing him at the exit of the Council of Ministers or during an official lunch, but he can prohibit the publication of photographs representing him at an event in his private life, such as a family reunion.”
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_à_l%27image_des_personne...
The proposed legislation is specific to deepfakes, i.e. artificially generated images of real persons.
For actual photographs of real persons Denmark and many other E.U. countries already have a broad system of legislation that governs your right to your own likeness. It usually assumes that it would be illegal to take and/or publish an image of a random person in a place/during an activity where they would have a reasonable expectation of privacy (i.e. in their backyard) or that was taken in a manner explicitly designed to circumvent reasonable precautions to ensure privacy.
This is counteracted by the public interest, which can cover certain activities of public persons (i.e. a prominent politician having an affair) or public activities of random persons (i.e. you taking part in a protest march). It's decided on a case by case basis based on quite detailed laws and decades of jurisprudence.
That's not a new question: what if you photograph a sculpture?
Then it gets complicated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama
How do these changes make sense being included into existing copyright law, as opposed to dedicated personality rights law? What is the original and creative work being copied? Is the idea that someone simply existing and doing mundane everyday activities such as walking their dog down around the park is performing an original and creative work as themselves on a daily basis with a likeness that others cannot derive their own performance of until 70 years after the person's death? If they increase the original and creative nature of their performance by wearing sunglasses with one rectangular pink frame with green lens, and a circular blue frame with yellow lens, and put on a clown wig, does this make their performance of walking a dog around the park creative enough to be copyrightable?
Is a Donald Trump impersonator (example[1]) copying the creative performance of Donald Trump (president)? What if someone did intend to create deepfakes of Donald Trump (president) and instead of using an image or audio of Donald Trump (president) as source material, use the Donald Trump impersonator as the source material?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2tWDJmdXH8
How would this work in the case of, say, identical twins?
Probably, okay until there's some conflict. Then, the lawyers will get paid some money to resolve it.
Win-win. For the lawyers.
Identical twins look different if you know them well.
AI generations of people look different if you know the subject well, too.
co-oprative license?
This looks so weird.
There is no creativity involved whatsoever. Plenty of people look similar enough that they share "copyrighted" features. Cartoons of prominent people = copyright infringement? (Europe has a long history of judgments and precedents that prominent people can be parodied etc., how will that square with a fancy copyright protection.) You can principially make money on your copyright, so if a twin "sells" their face rights and the other twin demands a share, then what?
Just make deepfakes a specific crime and do not mess with IP any further. It is already a mess.
interesting idea.. i like it. question tho, what happens if your features change... so say you have an accident and gain a scar or disfigurment. does that mean that your pre-disfigurement image is no longer copyrighted? or is your image for your whole life and at every stage of your life is copyrighted?
Public photography? does this mean your image cant be sold if take in public? I'm sure there are many other scenarios that would be interesting to argue about as well.
All of this has been resolved already. In Germany, as in many other E.U. countries, you have a "right to your own likeness" that covers all of your likenesses, no matter what age.
This right is restricted for people of public interest. An important politician might be an "absolute" person of public interest and as long as they remain in their public position, certain private acts might still be judged to be in the public interest to be documented and published.
But anybody can become a "relative" person of public interest. I.e. you were one of the people climbing the Berlin Wall during the night that it fell. If you get your picture taken at that point in time, there is an obvious public interest in publishing it. But just because you participated in this one public event, a reporter can't snap your picture and publish it a week later.
There is also an exception for "panorama" images, i.e. a person being in an image of a public place "by chance". In that scenario the person isn't allowed to be the main subject, their presence must be circumstantial.
All of this has been hashed out over decades by lawmakers and courts and it is quite easy to understand if you read up on it even a tiny bit. A common sense approach will get you 95% there.
Another scenario: what if you wanted to change some features?
with or without Mustache?
You already have the idea of personality rights - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
Like Arnie wouldn't allow his likeness in the C64 predator game (Which also had backstory not in the movie, blew my mind, games could build on movies and actors had rights to the likeness of a movie character they were)
Does this mean corporation's can't CCTV me like I can't film in a theater?
A lot of problems with this, and the real privacy benefits won't be enforced, we will see what happens.
Which, implicitly, also means that the State now has the right to "give" the copy-right to one's own features. Which, implicitly, also means that now the same State has the right to "get back" / retrieve the copy-right to one's own features, after all it was the State that gave it away in the first place. Absolute bleak world.
So if I look like celebrity, can I sue them for copyright infringement? Or I will get sued back?
Or if I get tattoo wit logo, is that "my own feature" and now I have copyright?!
This is like giving copyright to a name, there will be collisions and conflicts.
You're taking a very ethnocentric view towards this. Most European cultures don't have the same legal culture that the US has.
Punitive damages are very rare or non-existent depending on the country and the loser of the case usually has to pay the winning party's legal fees. There just isn't the incentive to sue someone over something silly like what you've mentioned.
Do you trust big business and the increasingly authoritarian nature of modern politics not to abuse the law as far as they can?
I sure as hell don't.
That is how every law works. There's people specialized in handling collisions and conflicts.
It's also why the idea that "code is law" popular in certain circles was always misguided.
I don't think the law's aiming to copyright your existence like a trademark, but more to stop people from digitally cloning you without consent
That has nothing to do with promoting progress and creativity, and all to do with privacy. Remember that photographs of people already have copyright protection. Why did they lump a privacy law into copyright? It's already dysfunctional as it is.
We moved past content scarcity decades ago and we are squarely in the attention scarcity regime. We use copyright against itself to have open source. We prefer interactivity and collaboration, as in open source, social networks or online games. Copyright stands in the path of collaboration and interaction.
Will companies now need to license "the likeness" of people too? Will "likeness" be property to be sold or rented?
- either the famous person cannot use their look if a lookalike refuses to agree
- or they have to pay all lookalikes to use their own image
- or the lookalikes get less protection under this law
- a person might lose their look-rights if they change their appearance to look like someone else
- someone who wants to go into acting might not get hired if they look too much like a famous actor
I don't know how to tell you this, but Denmark is a sovereign state and does not derive its interpretation and objectives of copyright from the US constitution.
> Will companies now need to license "the likeness" of people too?
They already do.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
You keep saying what "we" prefer, but I wasn't aware that everyone shared the same values around privacy. Some cultures take it much more seriously than others, often in ways you wouldn't expect if you're coming from e.g. the US.