Congress Is About to Hand You a Property Right in Your Own Voice, and No Family Is Ready to Enforce One

The mechanics, plainly, before the argument:

• Status. S.4591 cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on a unanimous voice vote on 18 June 2026, was formally reported on 24 June 2026, and sits on the Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders, Calendar No. 446. As at July 2026 the full Senate has not voted, so nothing in the bill is enforceable.

• Who is covered. Every "individual", defined in the text as "a human being, living or dead." No fame threshold, no requirement that your identity carry commercial value.

• What becomes actionable. Publishing, distributing or transmitting an unauthorised digital replica of a person's voice or visual likeness, and selling a product or service whose primary purpose is producing them. Making a replica is not itself the violation.

• Damages. $5,000 per work against an individual defendant, $25,000 per work against a company that is not an online service, and up to $750,000 per work against an online service outside the safe harbour.

• A disclaimer is no defence. Labelling a replica as AI-generated, or as unauthorised, does not make distributing one lawful.

• After death. The right passes to executors and heirs for ten years, renewable in five-year increments only on proof of active licensed use plus a filing with the Register of Copyrights, to a ceiling of seventy years.

• Deadline to sue. Three years from when you discovered, or should have discovered, the violation.

The bill is named for the entertainment industry and the loudest voices behind it come from that world. SAG-AFTRA put out an open letter carrying more than 16,000 signatures. TikTok and YouTube backed the bill, NetChoice opposed the bill. So the coverage was written about performers, with a line near the bottom about ordinary people that nobody unpacked.

"A human being, living or dead" is the entire test. Holland & Knight, writing up the committee vote in June 2026, described the effect as giving "every individual, whether a celebrity or a private citizen" a licensable property right in their own voice and visual likeness. Most state right of publicity doctrine grew out of commercial misappropriation, and in a number of states still turns on whether your identity had value somebody exploited. A right that begins at personhood rather than marketability is a different animal.

The right is also not assignable during your lifetime: the text bars transfer "during the life of the individual, including through involuntary transfer, such as by means of bankruptcy, levy, lien enforcement, court order, or other legal process." A creditor cannot seize your voice to settle a debt. You can only licence the right, in writing, signed by you, with "a reasonably specific description of the intended uses," for a maximum of ten years, five for a minor or until they turn eighteen, whichever comes first.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reads that cap coldly. EFF warns that "a background actor who signs a release on set or an ordinary person who clicks through a platform's terms of service could end up with the right to their own face and voice in someone else's hands, for years," now with federal enforcement behind the transfer. Ten years is a limit if you were facing forever, and a long time if you were facing nothing.

A "digital replica" is a "newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation that is readily identifiable as the voice or visual likeness of an individual" in material where that person did not actually perform, or where a real performance was materially altered. A voice clone with no video attached sits inside the definition.

Liability lands in two places. Anyone who publishes, distributes or transmits an unauthorised replica, or sells a product or service whose primary purpose is producing them, faces a civil claim. An online service that hosts a replica knowing the depicted person did not consent is liable too, at $25,000 per work inside the safe harbour and up to $750,000 outside, or per product used to generate replicas. Getting inside means registering a designated agent with the Copyright Office, terminating repeat violators, and removing material "as soon as is technologically and practically feasible" after a valid notice, with a fourteen-day counter-notice window for whoever posted the material, as Holland & Knight records.

Then the anti-loophole clause: a disclaimer is not a defence, the sharpest line between this bill and a transparency regime like Article 50 of the EU AI Act, which makes synthetic content declare itself but never decides who owns your voice.

Liability turns on knowledge, not deception. A distributor is liable where it knew, or wilfully avoided knowing, that the depicted person did not consent, and nothing asks a claimant to prove an intent to deceive. Bona fide satire and parody are carved out, but the bill never says what makes satire bona fide, and a federal judge would decide that case by case, at somebody's expense.

The right survives you, and the seventy years in the coverage is a ceiling, not a term.

On death the right passes to your "executors, heirs, assignees, licensees, or devisees" for ten years, then renews in five-year increments, but only if the right holder can show "active and authorized public use" of your voice or likeness during the preceding two years, and files a notice to that effect with the Register of Copyrights under penalty of perjury. The right ends at the earlier of the last valid renewal or seventy years after your death.

So the post-mortem right is built for estates already doing business with a likeness. If nobody in your family licenses your voice, and nobody files at the Copyright Office, the federal right lapses about a decade after you die. Seventy years describes an estate like Elvis Presley's.

Which puts the weight somewhere a statute cannot reach. What you get after death depends on whether one living person knows they hold the right, knows what you consented to, and can prove what you sounded like, which is the same floor you reach from the other direction in who actually controls your identity after you die. A statute can hand out rights all day. A named human being is the only thing that enforces one.

The exclusions are broad on purpose. Manatt reads the 2026 text as expanding the First Amendment protections carried in earlier versions, part of why the firm calls this version closer to enactment than any prior session.

S.4591 excludes replicas used in a "bona fide news, public affairs, or sports broadcast" where the use is materially relevant; in a documentary, or "in a historical or biographical manner"; in "bona fide commentary, criticism, scholarship, satire, or parody"; where the use is "fleeting or negligible"; and in advertisements for any of those works. The 2026 version added carve-outs for nonprofit libraries and archives and for accredited nonprofit educational institutions acting without commercial purpose. Every exclusion drops away where the replica depicts sexually explicit conduct.

None of which satisfied EFF, which opposed the bill in June 2026 and signed a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee not to advance the text in its current form. The argument is about incentives: notice-and-removal plus statutory damages pushes a platform toward deleting first. In EFF's words, "faced with a 'heckler's veto' over legal speech, platforms will have incentives to remove content first and ask questions later," because "any platform that guesses wrong faces penalties of up to $750,000 per work."

I want this bill to pass. One provision in it is dangerous. Under S.4591, a right holder can ask the clerk of any federal district court, not a judge, to issue a subpoena identifying an alleged violator, on the strength of the notice already sent, which is the machinery of section 512(h) of the copyright statute. EFF has argued that the copyright version lets a rights holder "wield the court's power to override an internet user's right to anonymous speech, without permission from a judge," and has documented copyright trolls using the procedure to extract settlements. To be exact: EFF's published NO FAKES analysis does not raise the subpoena, so that comparison is our reading of the bill text beside EFF's separate argument about the copyright version.

You can want a federal right in your own voice and still not want an unmasking tool that skips the judge. Either way, the text you live under may not be the text on this page, which is why the page carries a review date.

Start building your legacy Free build, 50 memories, no card required.

S.4591 preempts state-law protections covering voice and likeness in digital replicas, but expressly does not preempt causes of action available under state statute or common law as of 2 January 2025 in four areas: existing digital replica statutes, sexually explicit deepfakes, election-related replicas, and the tools that produce replicas.

So the state laws on the books keep running. Tennessee's ELVIS Act was signed on 21 March 2024 and took effect on 1 July 2024, extending the state publicity right to a voice "regardless of whether the sound contains the actual voice or a simulation of the voice of the individual." California's AB 1836 and AB 2602 were signed on 17 September 2024 and took effect on 1 January 2025, covering digital replicas of deceased performers and unconscionable replica clauses in performer contracts.

What the preemption clause stops is the next wave: a state that wanted to go further than the federal floor after enactment would be blocked. Thin publicity law where you live means a floor you never had. Nashville or Los Angeles means you keep everything you had and add a federal route, which is why the state-by-state picture of digital replica law is worth checking before you rely on any of this.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act is law. S.146 was signed on 19 May 2025 as Public Law 119-12. It criminalises non-consensual publication of intimate images including AI "digital forgeries," and obliges covered platforms, on a valid request from the depicted person, to remove the material and make reasonable efforts to remove identical copies within 48 hours. Platforms had until 19 May 2026 to have that live, so the duty is in effect and the FTC enforces. The statute reaches intimate imagery only, and it is the one route in force today with a fixed removal deadline rather than a lawsuit you fund.

State right of publicity law, where you live. The Right of Publicity statute tracker lists 25 states with a right of publicity statute. Elsewhere the protection comes from common law or privacy doctrine, and Cornell's Legal Information Institute puts the recognition rate below where most people assume: "Only about half the states have distinctly recognized a right of publicity." Enforcement is a private civil suit you fund, whether the right reaches non-famous people varies, and the term after death runs from none to decades.

The FTC impersonation rule, and its gap. The Trade Regulation Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses (16 CFR Part 461) is in force and covers what its name says. The FTC proposed extending it to impersonation of individuals in a supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking in 2024, and held an informal hearing on that proposal on 17 January 2025. The extension has not been finalised. Impersonating a bank breaks a federal rule today. Impersonating your father does not.

Four Free Steps To Take Before Anything Happens To You

1. Make a dated voice baseline. Record two or three minutes of yourself reading something whose date is independently verifiable, such as that morning's front page. Keep the original untouched, with its metadata, and put a copy somewhere you do not control. Nobody else can make that recording for you later.

2. Name the person. Write down, in one line, who is authorised to act about your voice and face if you cannot. Under the bill that person is the "right holder" after your death. Before your death, that person is whoever the platform will listen to.

3. Learn the two notice routes now. For intimate imagery, StopNCII.org lets adults hash images on their own device so participating platforms block matches without the image ever being uploaded. For everything else, find your platforms' impersonation reporting form while you are calm.

4. Keep a log. Dates, URLs, screenshots. The three-year clock runs from discovery, and every takedown process on earth asks when you first saw the material.

None of that costs anything, and all of it survives whatever the Senate does, which is also the logic behind how you prove a voice is really yours and protecting your voice from AI cloning without a legal budget.

Congress owns the legal half of this problem, and Congress is slow. The evidence half is buildable this week, and no bill is required.

Congress can write you a right to your own voice. Nobody but you can make the dated recording that proves which voice is yours.

That is what we build at Afterlife.ai™, and the pitch is narrower than this category's marketing usually admits. A guide called Idy interviews you in conversation rather than a form, and pulls out how you tell a story and how you answer something you would rather not discuss. Each memory is held in your own words and stamped with the date you gave that memory. The free build is a one-time budget, not a monthly allowance, up to 100 chats and 50 memories, and what you build does not expire. No card is asked for, and a model trained only on you, rather than on the internet with your name attached is the only version worth anything as evidence of how you sound and think. The paid plans set out what sits beyond the free build.

Your voice is cloned from recordings you make yourself, inside the product, and no audio can be captured or synthesised until a dated media consent is recorded on your account. That is a reference sample with a documented origin, held against memories that came from you, the opposite of the clip on the call to your mother.

The memories and the voice together make what we call a "Persona". Personas answer in your voice, from what you actually said, and will not invent a concrete detail about your life to fill a gap. Where a detail is missing, Personas answer from what the memories do hold. The guarantee is no invented facts, and not a running commentary on what is missing.

Now the limits, from me rather than from a review. A dated consent record and an original recording are evidence, not proof. None of the sources on this page establish that a record of this kind has been tested in a US court or in a platform appeal, and we will not claim otherwise until one has. Building one does nothing to stop somebody making a replica of you elsewhere, and neither would the bill on the Senate calendar. What a dated build does is make the real version cheap to produce and awkward to argue with, at the moment somebody has to decide which recording is you.

You nominate who may reach what you built. Nobody else can. Release runs through Executor Lock™, a seven-day evidence-verified process, and you can change the list or stop the whole thing at any point while you are alive.

That gives your named person the three things S.4591 assumes they already have: a record of what you consented to, dated originals of your voice, and standing to act. If the bill passes, that is the person who holds the right. If the bill dies when this Congress ends, that is still the person a platform will take a call from.

Start building your legacy Free build, 50 memories, no card required.

Has the NO FAKES Act passed?

No. S.4591, the NO FAKES Act of 2026, was introduced on 20 May 2026, ordered favourably reported by the Senate Judiciary Committee on a unanimous voice vote on 18 June 2026, formally reported on 24 June 2026 and placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders, Calendar No. 446. As at 29 July 2026 the full Senate has not voted. A House companion, H.R.8915, is also pending. Nothing in the bill is enforceable yet.

Does the NO FAKES Act cover me if I have never performed or sold anything?

Yes. The bill defines an individual as "a human being, living or dead," and imposes no requirement of fame, prior commercial use, or economic value in your identity. That is the main way it differs from a lot of existing state right of publicity law, which in some states still asks whether your identity had value somebody exploited.

If someone clones my voice today, what do I actually do?

Report the material to the platform hosting it under their impersonation policy, screenshot everything with dates, and check your state's publicity or replica statute, because some already apply. If the content is sexually explicit, the TAKE IT DOWN Act notice-and-removal process has been mandatory for covered platforms since 19 May 2026, and StopNCII.org can hash images from your device so participating platforms block matches.

Would the NO FAKES Act stop AI companies training on my voice?

No. The bill regulates distributing unauthorised digital replicas and the products whose primary purpose is producing them. It does not create a training-data consent right and it does not stop a model being built. If a model trained on your voice is used to publish a replica of you without permission, that publication is what the bill reaches. What the AI companies already hold of you, and what becomes of that material, is a separate question worth asking, starting with what happens to your ChatGPT memories when you die.

What does the free build cost, and what if the company folds?

The free build gets you a working version from 50 memories before you pay anything, with no card, and what you build never expires. The plans page sets out what sits beyond the free build. On company failure, the honest answer is that any service can fail, which is why you can export your memories and your conversations as a single JSON file from your account at any time, and why release runs as a defined process rather than a promise you have to take on trust.

Can I delete everything I have built?

Yes, while you are alive, and the deletion is permanent. Deleting your account removes the memories, the conversations, the stored recordings and images, and the login itself. One honest exception: if you have acted inside somebody else's Executor Lock process, as a reporter or a witness or a party to a dispute, those fiduciary records are built to survive your account, so the self-service delete stops there and support finishes the job with you.

• Who controls your identity after you die is the parent question, and maps the four parties who hold pieces of the answer.

• Digital replica laws state by state tells you what applies where you live, which decides whether this bill is a floor or a ceiling.

• How to prove a voice is really you is the practical follow-on, because every route here starts with an assertion you have to back.

• Who owns your voice clone, you or the company that built the clone is the contract question behind the statutory one.

• Whether voice cloning is safe, and what a responsible one looks like comes at the problem from the product side.

Primary sources first, with law firm and press analyses corroborating dates and characterisations, never the sole source for a claim. Every quotation was checked against the source it is attributed to, and one attribution that did not survive that check was removed, which is noted at source 7. Not settled: whether the bill passes the Senate at all, whether the text survives unamended, how courts would read the exclusions for satire and commentary, whether the clerk-issued subpoena provision stays in, and whether the FTC extends its impersonation rule to individuals. Nothing here is legal advice, and if a fake of you is already circulating you need a lawyer in your state rather than an article.

Found something wrong or out of date? Tell us on the contact page and we will check the primary source and correct the page.

1. S.4591, NO FAKES Act of 2026, reported committee text (119th Congress), GovInfo, reported 24 June 2026. Full text. Source for the definitions of "digital replica" and "individual", the non-assignability and licence term limits, statutory damages figures, safe harbour conditions, post-mortem term and renewal filing, exclusions, preemption, subpoena provision, three-year limitations period and the 180-day effective date.

2. S.4591 bill status and legislative actions, GovInfo BILLSTATUS, 119th Congress. XML record. Introduced 20 May 2026, ordered reported 18 June 2026, reported and calendared 24 June 2026, Calendar No. 446. Sponsor Sen. Christopher A. Coons, 14 cosponsors.

3. S.4591 bill page, Congress.gov, 119th Congress. Bill page.

4. Senate Committee Advances Bill to Protect Name, Image, Likeness and Voice Against Unauthorized AI Use, Holland & Knight, June 2026. Holland & Knight analysis of the committee action. Source for the 18 June 2026 unanimous voice vote, the "celebrity or private citizen" characterisation, the 14-day counter-notice window and the 2 January 2025 preemption cut-off.

5. Congress Reintroduces the NO FAKES Act: What's New in the 2026 Bill, Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, 2026. Manatt client alert on the 2026 bill. Source for the 20 May 2026 reintroduction, the House companion H.R.8915, the counter-notification procedure and the nonprofit library, archive and educational institution exclusions.

6. AI deepfakes bill advanced by Senate Judiciary Committee, Roll Call, 18 June 2026. Roll Call report on the committee vote. Source for the SAG-AFTRA open letter with more than 16,000 signatures and for TikTok's and YouTube's support, and for NetChoice's opposition.

7. The NO FAKES Act Could Silence Satire, Commentary, And News, Electronic Frontier Foundation, June 2026. Analysis. Source for EFF's opposition and the letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, the "heckler's veto" and "remove content first and ask questions later" quotes, the "up to $750,000 per work" figure as EFF states it, and the licensing quote about background actors and clickthrough terms of service. This piece does not discuss the subpoena provision, and is not cited on that point.

Separately, Victory! Ninth Circuit Limits Intrusive DMCA Subpoenas, Electronic Frontier Foundation, August 2025. Analysis. Source for EFF's argument about clerk-issued subpoenas under section 512(h) of the copyright statute and their abuse by copyright trolls. The clerk-issued subpoena in S.4591 itself is sourced to the bill text at source 1.

1. TAKE IT DOWN Act, S.146, Public Law 119-12, signed 19 May 2025. Statute text, and Congressional Research Service, LSB11314, for the 48-hour removal duty and the one-year compliance deadline of 19 May 2026.

2. ELVIS Act, Tennessee, signed 21 March 2024, effective 1 July 2024. Governor's announcement.

3. California AB 1836 and AB 2602, signed 17 September 2024, effective 1 January 2025. Proskauer analysis of the California digital replica laws.

4. Trade Regulation Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses, 16 CFR Part 461, Federal Trade Commission. Rule page, and the FTC's December 2024 announcement of the 17 January 2025 informal hearing on extending the rule to individuals. Not finalised as at July 2026. The Federal Register publication date of the supplemental notice is reported inconsistently across secondary sources and we could not reach the primary record, so this page gives the year only.

5. FTC Data Show People Reported Losing $3.5 Billion to Imposter Scams in 2025, Federal Trade Commission, June 2026. Press release. Source for the $3.5 billion 2025 figure only.

6. Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers (VALL-E), Microsoft Research, arXiv:2301.02111, 5 January 2023. Paper. Source, quoted verbatim from the abstract, for synthesis from a three-second enrolled recording.

7. Right of Publicity Statutes and Interactive Map, rightofpublicity.com. Statute tracker. Source for the count of 25 states with a right of publicity statute. Corroborated on breadth by Cornell Legal Information Institute, Right of Publicity: an overview, for "only about half the states have distinctly recognized a right of publicity."

8. StopNCII.org, operated by SWGfL and the Revenge Porn Helpline. Tool. On-device hashing for adults, images are not uploaded.

Last reviewed: 30 July 2026. This page tracks a bill that has not passed and platform obligations that change without notice, so it is on a 30-day recheck cycle until the facts settle. Legislative status verified against GovInfo BILLSTATUS on 29 July 2026.