8 ms·

Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features

146 points by tfourb 1y ago

eesmith 1y ago
Is this the sort of copyright where ownership can be sold or transferred? The article didn't explain how this works.
- rusk 1y ago
  Presumably non fungible …
- Logiar 1y ago
  If you sell the copyright, does that mean you can no longer look like yourself?
  - harvey9 1y ago
    Non exclusive license? This might be useful to actors if someone generates video of them too.
- exiguus 1y ago
  Usually in Europe, there is no copyleft. Copyright can not be sold. Only the right of use.
  - eesmith 1y ago
    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?
    - exiguus 1y ago
      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.
aitchnyu 1y ago
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.
- andsoitis 1y ago
  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-protect-your-right-to-you/ https://rinckerlaw.com/name-image-and-likeness-how-to-protec...
throw83838484 1y ago
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.
- superfrank 1y ago
  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.
  - LocalH 1y ago
    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.
- RataNova 1y ago
  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
- riffraff 1y ago
  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.
sjducb 1y ago
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.
- RataNova 1y ago
  It's kind of wild that brands have had more robust protections than actual people when it comes to identity
  - tfourb 1y ago
    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.
    - RataNova 1y ago
      I guess what feels striking is how aggressively brand identity gets enforced globally (takedowns, lawsuits), while individual likeness rights often feel fragmented or reactive
- mongol 1y ago
  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?
  - rsynnott 1y ago
    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.
pu_pe 1y ago
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?
- zakki 1y ago
  There is always outlier (i look like someone) in anything. However this universal approach is a win for the people.
- HPsquared 1y ago
  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.
  - ImHereToVote 1y ago
    Not with that attitude you can't.
    - HPsquared 1y ago
      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.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  It works both ways. You’d have to find compromise.
- medstrom 1y ago
  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.
RataNova 1y ago
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
- tfourb 1y ago
  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.
cheald 1y ago
How would this work in the case of, say, identical twins?
- senectus1 1y ago
  co-oprative license?
- zx8080 1y ago
  Probably, okay until there's some conflict. Then, the lawyers will get paid some money to resolve it. Win-win. For the lawyers.
- lupusreal 1y ago
  Identical twins look different if you know them well.
  - cheald 1y ago
    AI generations of people look different if you know the subject well, too.
TrackerFF 1y ago
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 http://www.francoisbrunelle.com/webn/e-project.html
- twiceaday 1y ago
  To me #3 sort of looks similar, but everybody else is clearly not close to similar.
  - g0db1t 1y ago
    [dead]
- dominicrose 1y ago
  This reminds me of conspiracy theories about famous people having doubles.
  - belter 1y ago
    Its true... :-) https://i0.wp.com/vid.alarabiya.net/images/2017/05/09/abeaa968-1d5d-46e5-a97f-8a7c2cd62c6a/abeaa968-1d5d-46e5-a97f-8a7c2cd62c6a_16x9_788x442.jpg https://i0.wp.com/vid.alarabiya.net/images/2017/05/09/abeaa9...?
- m4tthumphrey 1y ago
  This is very odd. Hardly any of them look alike let alone doppelgänger status...
  - TrackerFF 1y ago
    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-doppelgangers https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/10/14/francois-brunelle... https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1cimhns/canadian_photographer_francois_brunell_searches/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1cimhns/canadian_...
beardyw 1y ago
Not sure I understand how this would work with, say, a photograph of a person. Does the photographer own the copyright, or the photographed?
- germanier 1y ago
  That's not a new question: what if you photograph a sculpture?
  - afandian 1y ago
    Then it gets complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama
- docdeek 1y ago
  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_personnes_en_France https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_à_l%27image_des_personne...
- tfourb 1y ago
  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.
senectus1 1y ago
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.
- amelius 1y ago
  Another scenario: what if you wanted to change some features?
- tfourb 1y ago
  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.
enoeht 1y ago
with or without Mustache?
aaron695 1y ago
You already have the idea of personality rights - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
visarga 1y ago
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
- pwdisswordfishz 1y ago
  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.
- aqme28 1y ago
  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.
- chrisjj 1y ago
  > Will companies now need to license "the likeness" of people too? They already do. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
inglor_cz 1y ago
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.
codedokode 1y ago
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.
- Barrin92 1y ago
  >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
  - JimDabell 1y ago
    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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
- junaru 1y ago
  > 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.
  - codedokode 1y ago
    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.
Papazsazsa 1y ago
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.
- tfourb 1y ago
  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.
paganel 1y ago
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.
Quarondeau 1y ago
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.
- wizzwizz4 1y ago
  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.
  - horsawlarway 1y ago
    Yes, but this is also fake.
    - wizzwizz4 1y ago
      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.
- nopcode 1y ago
  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).
JdeBP 1y ago
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.
dhx 1y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2tWDJmdXH8

146 points by tfourb 1y ago

eesmith 1y ago

Is this the sort of copyright where ownership can be sold or transferred? The article didn't explain how this works.

rusk 1y ago
Presumably non fungible …
Logiar 1y ago
If you sell the copyright, does that mean you can no longer look like yourself?
- harvey9 1y ago
  Non exclusive license? This might be useful to actors if someone generates video of them too.
exiguus 1y ago
Usually in Europe, there is no copyleft. Copyright can not be sold. Only the right of use.
- eesmith 1y ago
  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?
  - exiguus 1y ago
    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.

aitchnyu 1y ago

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.

andsoitis 1y ago
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-protect-your-right-to-you/ https://rinckerlaw.com/name-image-and-likeness-how-to-protec...

throw83838484 1y ago

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.

superfrank 1y ago
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.
- LocalH 1y ago
  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.
RataNova 1y ago
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
riffraff 1y ago
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.

sjducb 1y ago

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.

RataNova 1y ago
It's kind of wild that brands have had more robust protections than actual people when it comes to identity
- tfourb 1y ago
  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.
  - RataNova 1y ago
    I guess what feels striking is how aggressively brand identity gets enforced globally (takedowns, lawsuits), while individual likeness rights often feel fragmented or reactive
mongol 1y ago
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?
- rsynnott 1y ago
  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.

pu_pe 1y ago

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?

zakki 1y ago
There is always outlier (i look like someone) in anything. However this universal approach is a win for the people.
HPsquared 1y ago
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.
- ImHereToVote 1y ago
  Not with that attitude you can't.
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    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.
wiseowise 1y ago
It works both ways. You’d have to find compromise.
medstrom 1y ago
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.

RataNova 1y ago

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

tfourb 1y ago
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.

cheald 1y ago

How would this work in the case of, say, identical twins?

senectus1 1y ago
co-oprative license?
zx8080 1y ago
Probably, okay until there's some conflict. Then, the lawyers will get paid some money to resolve it. Win-win. For the lawyers.
lupusreal 1y ago
Identical twins look different if you know them well.
- cheald 1y ago
  AI generations of people look different if you know the subject well, too.

TrackerFF 1y ago

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 http://www.francoisbrunelle.com/webn/e-project.html

twiceaday 1y ago
To me #3 sort of looks similar, but everybody else is clearly not close to similar.
- g0db1t 1y ago
  [dead]
dominicrose 1y ago
This reminds me of conspiracy theories about famous people having doubles.
- belter 1y ago
  Its true... :-) https://i0.wp.com/vid.alarabiya.net/images/2017/05/09/abeaa968-1d5d-46e5-a97f-8a7c2cd62c6a/abeaa968-1d5d-46e5-a97f-8a7c2cd62c6a_16x9_788x442.jpg https://i0.wp.com/vid.alarabiya.net/images/2017/05/09/abeaa9...?
m4tthumphrey 1y ago
This is very odd. Hardly any of them look alike let alone doppelgänger status...
- TrackerFF 1y ago
  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-doppelgangers https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/10/14/francois-brunelle... https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1cimhns/canadian_photographer_francois_brunell_searches/ https://www.reddit.com/r/BeAmazed/comments/1cimhns/canadian_...

beardyw 1y ago

Not sure I understand how this would work with, say, a photograph of a person. Does the photographer own the copyright, or the photographed?

germanier 1y ago
That's not a new question: what if you photograph a sculpture?
- afandian 1y ago
  Then it gets complicated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_panorama
docdeek 1y ago
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_personnes_en_France https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_à_l%27image_des_personne...
tfourb 1y ago
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.

senectus1 1y ago

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.

amelius 1y ago
Another scenario: what if you wanted to change some features?
tfourb 1y ago
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.

enoeht 1y ago

with or without Mustache?

aaron695 1y ago

You already have the idea of personality rights - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

visarga 1y ago

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

pwdisswordfishz 1y ago
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.
aqme28 1y ago
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.
chrisjj 1y ago
> Will companies now need to license "the likeness" of people too? They already do. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights

inglor_cz 1y ago

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.

codedokode 1y ago

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.

Barrin92 1y ago
>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
- JimDabell 1y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
junaru 1y ago
> 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.
- codedokode 1y ago
  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.

Papazsazsa 1y ago

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.

tfourb 1y ago
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.

paganel 1y ago

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.

Quarondeau 1y ago

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.

wizzwizz4 1y ago
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.
- horsawlarway 1y ago
  Yes, but this is also fake.
  - wizzwizz4 1y ago
    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.
nopcode 1y ago
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).

JdeBP 1y ago

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.

dhx 1y ago

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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2tWDJmdXH8