Whoever Holds Three Seconds of Your Voice Has More Say Than Your Will Does

Ask who controls your identity after you die and the honest answer is four parties, ranked by which of them can move fastest.

• Your estate holds a post-mortem right to your name, voice and likeness only where local law grants one. As at July 2026 that is roughly half of US states: 100 years in Indiana and Oklahoma, 70 in California, 40 in New York, 20 in Virginia, 10 in Tennessee, and nothing at all in Massachusetts.

• Platforms hold your accounts under terms that generally make an account non-transferable on death. Apple's Legacy Contact and Google's Inactive Account Manager are the exceptions, and both have to be switched on by you while you are alive.

• Whoever holds your recordings holds the raw material for a replica. Microsoft researchers published VALL-E in January 2023, a system that synthesises a target speaker's voice from three seconds of enrolled audio.

• The public holds everything you ever posted openly. No law in force or in draft anywhere proposes to claw that material back.

• Your will speaks to the first holder and to none of the other three. A will cannot bind a platform, a stranger in another country, or a relative who is not selling anything.

Rank those four by speed rather than by dignity. The estate right needs somebody who knows the right exists, a defendant with a name, a filing, a lawyer and money. The recordings need a laptop and a free evening.

The legal instruments on this page are real, and where they apply they are the only things with teeth. Every one of them also arrives second: the copy gets made, and then a cause of action turns up to argue about the copy. Any company in this category that sells families a legal shield it cannot deliver deserves the complaint coming for that company.

The USC Business Law Digest counted twenty-four states recognising a post-mortem right of publicity in April 2026, by statute or common law, including California, New York, Florida, Hawaii, Nevada and Texas. Counts differ between surveys, because some states reach the result through common law rather than a statute you can point at. In Massachusetts no court has held that the right survives death, and Rothman's Roadmap records bills to add one proposed in almost every legislative session, none becoming law. Indiana's hundred years applies regardless of domicile at death provided the use occurs in Indiana, Oklahoma's hundred years sits at Okla. Stat. tit. 12 section 1448, and Virginia's twenty years is statutory.

Tennessee is the broad end, deliberately. The Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act (the ELVIS Act, Tenn. Code Ann. 47-25-1101 et seq.), signed 21 March 2024 and effective 1 July 2024, was the first US statute written specifically for AI voice and likeness cloning. The Act grants post-mortem rights to every individual without asking whether you ever exploited your own identity while alive, so a plumber's voice is protected on the same terms as a country singer's. The right runs ten years from death, and can then terminate after two further years without commercial exploitation. A famous estate therefore holds the right more or less indefinitely by continuing to license the name, while an ordinary person's expires quietly because nobody was selling anything. The statute rewards commerce, not privacy.

California is the narrow end, which surprises people who have only heard the headline number. AB 1836, chaptered 17 September 2024 and effective 1 January 2025, added digital replicas to Civil Code section 3344.1: producing or distributing a digital replica of a deceased personality's voice or likeness in an expressive audiovisual work or sound recording without estate consent is unlawful, with liability at the greater of ten thousand US dollars or actual damages. The catch is the definition. A "deceased personality" is a person whose name, voice, signature, photograph or likeness had commercial value at the time of death, or because of death. If your likeness had no commercial value, California's seventy years was not written about you.

California also wants paperwork. Under section 3344.1(f)(1) a successor in interest must register the claim with the Secretary of State first, on a prescribed form, with a filing fee, on a register published online, before recovering damages. So the right can exist, be validly inherited, be plainly infringed and still yield nothing, because nobody filed a form. New York's section 50-f runs a comparable registration system, gives no cause of action for uses occurring before registration, and limits its digital replica limb to a "deceased performer": a deceased personality domiciled in New York at death who, for gain or livelihood, was regularly engaged in acting, singing, dancing or playing a musical instrument. Most readers are not that person either.

Washington's SB 5886, effective 10 June 2026, added a "forged digital likeness" to that state's right of publicity, covering audio or visual representations digitally created to be indistinguishable from a genuine depiction and likely to deceive a reasonable person, with a three thousand US dollar civil penalty alongside actual damages and infringer profits. Washington joined roughly a dozen states that have amended their publicity laws to reach unauthorised digital replicas, and the per-jurisdiction detail, including which states protect ordinary residents rather than performers, sits in the state-by-state breakdown of digital replica laws.

Two structural facts decide real family cases. Where the post-mortem right exists it is property, which is what makes a will worth writing: California Civil Code section 3344.1(b) makes the rights freely transferable or descendible, in whole or in part, by contract or by any trust or other testamentary instrument. Where you say nothing, section 3344.1(d) hands the right down a statutory ladder: your surviving spouse unless you have children or grandchildren, then the interest splits between them, then your surviving parents, with holders needing more than 50 percent of the interest between them to act. The person at the top of that ladder may be the relative most likely to build the chatbot.

Apple's iCloud Terms and Conditions make the account non-transferable and end rights to the Apple Account and its contents on death, except as allowed under Digital Legacy. Digital Legacy is a switch you throw yourself: you nominate a Legacy Contact while alive, Apple issues an access key, and after your death that person can request access to data in the account with the key and a death certificate. Apple reviews every request, and the resulting access lasts three years before the account is deleted. Nominate nobody and there is no key.

Google runs the same structure under a different name. Inactive Account Manager lets you set how long Google waits after your last activity, choose up to ten people to notify, and select which data each of them receives, with a download link sent by email. Some data types are excluded. Again the trigger is you, in advance, while alive, and the step-by-step setup for Inactive Account Manager takes about ten minutes. Social accounts run a third pattern, memorialisation rather than inheritance, and what happens to Facebook when you die is worth reading before you assume a legacy contact there behaves like Apple's.

Platforms honour instructions you gave them inside their own product, and ignore instructions you gave a lawyer. Your will speaks to your estate, and your estate does not own the account. What those accounts hold is most of the source material for a replica of you: the voice notes, the videos other people tagged you in, the years of writing that show how you phrase things. Deciding who inherits access to that material is deciding who is in a position to build a version of you. And neither company decides anything about a synthetic version of you that somebody else builds and hosts somewhere you never had an account.

In January 2023, researchers at Microsoft published VALL-E, a text-to-speech system that synthesises a target speaker's voice from a three-second enrolled recording of a speaker the model has never encountered before, preserving emotion and acoustic environment (Wang et al., arXiv:2301.02111). Every voicemail you have ever left clears that threshold with room to spare, which is why an outgoing greeting matters more than a photo album. A voicemail on somebody else's phone, a conference talk on a company's YouTube channel: each is a copy in another person's possession, governed by their choices and not by yours.

Federal intellectual property law does not close that gap, and the point was tested directly. In Lehrman v. Lovo, two voice actors sued an AI voice company after recordings they sold on Fiverr in 2019 and 2020 turned up as synthetic voices in a commercial product. On 10 July 2025, Judge J. Paul Oetken in the Southern District of New York dismissed most of the federal copyright and Lanham Act claims, holding that copyright "does not extend to something as abstract and intangible as a 'voice'". What survived were the state claims: New York Civil Rights Law sections 50 and 51, state consumer protection law, and ordinary breach of contract. Your voice is not a copyrightable work. Your voice is a personal attribute, governed by a patchwork of state statutes with different scopes, terms and exceptions, which is why the licensing terms that decide who may use a voice clone settle more of these disputes than any statute does.

A statute gives your family somebody to sue. A voicemail gives a stranger somebody to become.

Anything you published openly is already outside every consent mechanism, scraped, mirrored, cached, reposted and folded into training corpora before you thought about the question. Reducing the amount of unmanaged raw material, and knowing where the rest of it lives, is the most practical control you have, and the working guide to protecting your voice from cloning separates what reduces exposure from what is theatre. Keep dated originals of the recordings you make deliberately, because provenance disputes are won by whoever can show a timestamped chain, and how to prove a voice is really you sets out what that chain has to contain.

What the public does not hold is the material you never posted. The way you talk when nobody is recording. The story you have told four times at the same table. The reasoning you would use if your daughter asked you something hard twenty years from now. That material is still entirely yours, and it is the only part of this where acting now changes the outcome.

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As at July 2026, in most of the world, no law requires a person's consent before an AI version of them is built. In the United States the reason is structural: there is no federal right of publicity, so the question falls to the state patchwork mapped above, and most of that patchwork bites only on commercial use. A replica made to sell something is far more actionable than one made for amusement or harassment, and the same conduct can be unlawful in one state and untouched across the line.

One state law aims squarely at living people, and that law is a contract law. California's AB 2602, signed on 17 September 2024 alongside AB 1836 and operative from the same date, voids contract terms permitting a digital replica of a performer's voice or likeness unless the contract gives a reasonably specific description of the intended uses and the individual was represented by counsel or by a union in the negotiation. Anybody who has signed a services agreement with a broad likeness clause should know that provision by name.

Two federal instruments exist, and both are narrower than their reputations. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed 19 May 2025, criminalises publication of non-consensual intimate imagery including AI-generated depictions, and requires covered platforms to remove reported content, plus known identical copies, within 48 hours of a valid written request; the Federal Trade Commission began enforcing those platform obligations on 19 May 2026. The route works, and the route covers intimate imagery only. The FTC's impersonation rule, effective 1 April 2024, prohibits impersonating a government body or a business; the Commission proposed extending the rule to impersonation of individuals in a supplemental rulemaking announced in February 2024, and held an informal hearing on that proposed prohibition on 17 January 2025. As at July 2026 the extension has not been finalised, so the rule covering somebody impersonating you personally is still a proposal.

Readers in the UK and Australia have less than they think. England and Wales recognise no general image right and no personality right, so what exists is a patchwork you assemble after the fact: data protection, passing off if you have commercial goodwill, defamation if the content is false and damaging, harassment, and trade mark law if you registered something. The exception is intimate imagery again. Section 138 of the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 came into force on 6 February 2026 and makes it a criminal offence to create, or to request the creation of, a purported intimate image of an adult without consent, and a further government consultation on deepfake harms is expected in summer 2026, covering whether to create a new personality right, with no commitment to legislate. Australia sits in the same place, with no right of publicity and no standalone image right. The Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Act 2024 commenced on 3 September 2024 and criminalises transmitting sexual material depicting an adult without consent, with a maximum penalty of six years. The Act covers images and video. The Act does not cover audio, and does not reach non-sexual deepfakes made to deceive, humiliate or defraud.

If a fake of you is already online, the two fast routes are both about sex. One is the TAKE IT DOWN request above. The other is a Google Search flow added on 10 February 2026: on an image result, open the three-dot menu, choose to remove the result, and select the option stating that the result shows a sexual image of you. One form takes several images at once, you can opt in to safeguards that proactively filter further explicit results in similar searches, and you can track the request in the Results about you hub. Removal from Search leaves the content on the site hosting the content. Everything else falls to the platform's own policy, defamation, harassment, or a publicity claim in a state that has one where the use is commercial. A convincing clip of you saying something political, or something cruel about your own child, has no 48-hour route anywhere in the world. That is the honest limit of the system as built, and pretending otherwise is how companies in my industry lose the room.

The NO FAKES Act (S.4591, 119th Congress) would create a federal, inheritable digital replication right for every person, performer or otherwise. The bill is not law, and nothing in this section describes a right you hold today. S.4591 was reintroduced on 20 May 2026, advanced by unanimous voice vote of the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June 2026, and reported on 24 June 2026. No Senate vote, no House vote, no signature. Anybody telling you the NO FAKES Act protects you today is wrong.

In its reported form the bill gives a property-style right to authorise digital replicas of your voice and visual likeness, a digital replica being a newly created, computer-generated, highly realistic electronic representation readily identifiable as you. The right runs against whoever makes an unauthorised replica and whoever distributes one, and covers everyone rather than only public figures, which makes S.4591 the first instrument on this page that plausibly reaches a private individual rather than an advertiser.

The post-mortem term is the number that gets misreported. Ten years from death as an initial term, then successive five-year renewals, each conditional on the rights holder filing a notice with the Register of Copyrights inside the applicable two-year window, including a statement under penalty of perjury of active and authorised public use of the voice or likeness in commerce during that period. Whatever happens, the right terminates no later than seventy years after death. So seventy years is a ceiling reached by continuous documented commerce, not a floor granted to everybody, and for a family licensing nothing the realistic term is ten years.

The right passes to your executors, heirs, assignees, licensees or devisees, by will or as personal property under intestate succession. During your life the right is not permanently assignable, and licences are capped at ten years at a time, five years for a minor with automatic termination at eighteen, each requiring a written agreement describing the intended uses. That anti-lock-in provision is deliberate, and good.

For platforms the bill runs a DMCA-style notice and takedown route with an explicit no-duty-to-monitor clause, so a family can demand removal rather than sue. The figure everyone quotes, seven hundred and fifty thousand US dollars per work, is a ceiling in the bill text for an online service that has not made a good faith effort at those notice and takedown obligations; a service that has made the effort faces twenty-five thousand US dollars per work. After a counter-notification the material goes back up no sooner than fourteen days later unless the rights holder sues in the meantime, and a knowingly false counter-notification carries twenty-five thousand US dollars per filing or actual damages plus fees, whichever is greater. News reporting, parody, criticism and comparable First Amendment speech are carved out, as are non-profit libraries, archives and accredited non-profit educational institutions doing non-commercial research. The bill also preempts future state digital replica laws in expressive works while preserving state causes of action in existence as at 2 January 2025, plus state laws on sexually explicit deepfakes and election-related replicas. Tennessee's ELVIS Act survives. A new state law passed next year probably would not.

The objections are serious. The Electronic Frontier Foundation argued in June 2026 that the takedown route hands complainants a heckler's veto over lawful speech, because a platform facing that liability removes content first and asks questions later, with no safe harbour for judging that something was satire, commentary or news. Professor Jennifer Rothman, who runs the leading right of publicity resource, has argued that the bill protects record labels, large tech companies, the movie industry and those who seek to profit from and control dead celebrities, and that its long and broad licensing terms undermine the very people it names. Drafted by people who license likenesses for a living, for people who license likenesses for a living: a family with no licensing business is a rounding error. The full walkthrough of the NO FAKES Act sets out the safe harbour, the exclusions, and exactly what survives preemption.

Europe is doing something narrower and is more honest about being narrow. Article 50 of the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) applies from 2 August 2026 and is a transparency law. People must be told when they are interacting with an AI system unless that is obvious from context. Providers of generative systems must mark synthetic audio, image, video and text in a machine-readable format so the output is detectable as artificially generated. Anyone deploying a deepfake must disclose that the content is artificially generated or manipulated, clearly and distinguishably, at the latest on a person's first exposure. Intent to deceive is not an element, and evidently artistic, satirical or fictional works still need disclosure, in a manner that does not spoil the work. Breach sits in the penalty tier at Article 99(4): up to fifteen million euros or 3 percent of total worldwide annual turnover. The Digital Omnibus on AI, approved by the European Parliament on 16 June 2026 and adopted by the Council on 29 June 2026, left the substance of Article 50 alone, though systems already on the market before 2 August 2026 have until 2 December 2026 to meet the Article 50(2) marking and detection obligations. The high-risk deadlines moved much further out. The transparency duties did not.

Then the limit, which headlines skip. Article 50 decides whether synthetic content has to declare itself. Article 50 does not decide who is allowed to make a copy of your voice, and gives your family no right to say no, so a perfectly labelled AI version of you, disclosed exactly as the regulation requires, is fully compliant. A label is not a permission gate, and the labelling duties in detail are in what Article 50 means for you. GDPR Recital 27 catches families out for a second reason: the regulation does not apply to the personal data of deceased persons, although member states may make their own rules, and several have. Data protection is not the lever after death that most people assume.

Denmark proposed the most far-reaching answer anywhere, and Denmark has not landed the reform. In the summer of 2025 the Danish government proposed amending its Copyright Act, adding new sections 65a and 73a, to give every natural person protection against realistic digitally generated imitations of their personal characteristics, including appearance and voice, with a second limb covering imitations of performers. Consent of the person imitated is required before such content is made available, caricature, satire, parody and pastiche are excluded in principle, and protection runs for fifty years after that person's death. Enforcement would run through the notice and action route in the EU Digital Services Act, the Danish rules supplying the basis for calling the content illegal. In the explanatory notes annexed to the notified draft, the Danish authorities accept that they are not creating a new copyright for citizens even though the amendments sit inside the Copyright Act, and describe the exercise as supplementing unwritten private-law personality-rights principles.

The European Parliamentary Research Service briefing on the proposal (PE 782.611, January 2026) records that the draft was notified through the technical regulation information system, was open for comments until 3 February 2026, and was expected to enter into force in July 2026. Commentary in February 2026 reported a slip from an originally planned 31 March 2026 start around the calling of a snap Danish general election, held on 24 March 2026. The Commission raised objections in February 2026 and pushed back publicly in March 2026 on three grounds: fifty years from a performer's death exceeds the fifty years from the performance allowed by the Copyright Term Directive (2006/116), the measure would extend the filtering obligations in Article 17 of the Digital Single Market Directive to realistic imitations of performances, and personal characteristics considered in isolation do not naturally fall within copyright at all. As at July 2026 the amendment has not received final adoption.

The EPRS briefing also notes the rules would reach illegal content on Danish territory through geo-blocking by very large platforms and search engines, so unless other member states follow, an imitation of a Danish person stays available outside Denmark. Watch the file anyway: Denmark promoted the approach during its Council Presidency, its culture minister has said Ireland intends to follow, ministers from every member state except Hungary signed a declaration including a principle that citizens must be protected against non-consensual digital replicas of their personal characteristics, and the Netherlands has a comparable bill in progress. If a face right of this shape survives contact with EU law, that shape becomes the model.

On 2 October 2024, Drew Crecente discovered through a Google alert that a chatbot on Character.AI was using the name and yearbook photograph of his daughter Jennifer, who was murdered in 2006, described in the listing as "a knowledgeable and friendly AI character" who could discuss video games and pop culture. He contacted support and received an automated reply saying his complaint was under review. The character came down for violating the platform's impersonation policy after his brother Brian Crecente, the former editor-in-chief of the gaming site Kotaku, took the matter public on X the same day.

The policy worked because this particular family contained a journalist with an audience. That is what a platform policy is worth: the prohibition exists, the removal is discretionary, the reviewer is the company, and your family has no right of appeal because your family is not a party to anything. Most platforms have a bereavement process for accounts owned by the deceased. Almost none have a process for a third party's generated depiction of a dead person, and the terms are mostly silent on who in your family may even ask.

The likelier version is quieter than any of that. Somebody who loved you, six months after your funeral, sitting up at eleven at night with your text messages exported to a file, pasting them into whatever tool is free that week, because they want to hear from you one more time. They are not selling anything and they are not trying to hurt you. They will get your voice slightly wrong and your opinions badly wrong, and then they will show your grandchildren, and that becomes the version of you that lasts. What that costs a family, and why a plausible wrong version does more damage than no version at all, is set out in what it does to people to be remembered wrong.

Every legal instrument on this page misses that scene. Post-mortem publicity rights are overwhelmingly commercial rights, built to stop somebody selling something using your face, so a relative running a private chatbot and charging nobody often sits outside them entirely, the ELVIS Act and its missing commercial-value requirement being the unusual exception. Your will can name who holds the right and can say which uses you refuse, and a will still governs only your estate: a company in another country that scrapes a podcast you appeared on has agreed to nothing, and naming a holder does not create a right where the statute grants none. Platform policy is a favour. The state patchwork is a lottery. None of the three reaches your daughter at eleven at night.

Three things move without a lawyer and without buying anything.

Switch on the platform tools, because they outrank your will. Set up Google's Inactive Account Manager with your waiting period and your recipients, and add an Apple Legacy Contact, handing the access key to that person now rather than filing it away.

Name a digital executor, then write likeness instructions into your estate documents. Not necessarily your estate executor: one named person whose job is your accounts, your recordings and your likeness, with the authority written down and their contact details somewhere findable. Ask your solicitor for an explicit clause covering your name, voice, image and likeness, naming the holder yourself rather than letting the statutory ladder choose, and saying the refusals specifically. "No commercial endorsement, no political use, no synthetic performance in any work I did not agree to during my life" is a sentence a court can act on, and vagueness is what gets litigated. If you are domiciled in California, put the section 3344.1(f)(1) registration requirement in a one-page written instruction, because your executor will not discover the requirement under time pressure.

Inventory the audio rather than the photographs. One document listing where meaningful audio and video of you actually lives: platforms, drives, other people's phones, employers, podcast feeds, conference talks, business voicemail. You cannot delete most of that and you should not try. Three seconds is the threshold, so the list tells you how convincing a scraped version of you would be, which tells you what an authored version is worth.

Then say it out loud, to the two or three people most likely to build a version of you, now, in an ordinary conversation rather than in a letter to be opened later. Write the same thing down, sign it, date it, and give a copy to whoever will administer your estate. A signed statement of what you do and do not consent to carries no legal force whatsoever, and in the family scenario a recorded wish decides the outcome anyway, because the argument in that room is only ever about what you would have wanted. Cambridge researchers Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, writing in Philosophy & Technology in 2024, set out recommendations for providers of re-creation services, and the one that bites hardest here is the principle of mutual consent of both data donors and service interactants: the person whose material is used and the person who will talk to the result should both have agreed. In most families neither conversation ever happens, and that silence is the space an improvised version fills. When a replica of a dead person is defensible and when it is not is argued out in the ethics of building a replica of someone who has died.

The fourth instrument is not a legal one. Leave a version you authored, and name the people allowed to open the version you left.

That is what we build at Afterlife.ai™, and the claim is deliberately narrow. A guide called Idy interviews you in sessions over time rather than handing you a long questionnaire, the next question following what you just said rather than a script, and your answers become memories in your own phrasing, with the reasoning you used. Nothing is scraped: your voice is cloned from recordings you make deliberately, inside the product, with you present, which leaves you a dated, consented set of source recordings in one place instead of a scatter of podcast audio and old video anybody can lift. What you build is called a "Persona": your memories, your phrasing, your voice, answering from the material you gave and never inventing what you did not say. Before handing any provider a voice sample, the safety questions to ask about voice cloning are the ones to put to us as well as to everybody else.

You nominate who may receive access, as a named list written by you, and nobody else can be added by a platform, an algorithm or a subsequent owner. Release runs through Executor Lock™: a nominated person initiates the request, evidence of death is verified, a seven-day hold runs before anything unlocks, and everyone involved is notified throughout, so release can be stopped inside the window, including by you if you are alive. At the moment the lock triggers, the snapshot captures everything exactly as you left things, and nothing is pruned, re-weighted or edited afterwards. While you are alive you can edit your memories, change who is nominated, and delete the whole build outright.

Now the tradeoffs, because we know where the edges are. The same synthesis technology that lets you record a consented voice is what makes an unconsented one cheap, and the three-second figure applies to us exactly as it applies to anybody else. A deliberate recording session is slower than letting a tool scrape your old videos, and that friction is the point rather than a defect we intend to remove. A short first session produces a thin build, and the build stays inside that thinness, because the generation rules forbid filling a gap with an invented detail. A nominated list is only as good as the names on the list, which leaves one step no product can do for you: the conversation with the people you named. Your first fifty memories are free, no card, and the free build does not expire, because the worst version of this industry is one that charges grieving families at the moment they are least able to refuse. What sits beyond the free build is on the plans page.

None of this replaces the law, and none of this stops a stranger with a scraper. Two things do change. If somebody later produces a synthetic version of you, a consented, evidence-gated, voice-verified build you made while alive is the reference point your family can hold the fake up against. And in the likelier scenario, the family one, an authored version removes the reason anybody would improvise their own.

You do not have to be famous and you do not have to sue anybody. A version of you, built by you, released by a person you named.

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

Method, limits and corrections. This page is not legal advice and does not substitute for a solicitor or an estate lawyer in your own jurisdiction. Likeness law is state law in the United States, national law almost everywhere else, and it changes faster than any page can promise to track, which is why every legal claim above carries a date and the page is rechecked every thirty days. Every legal claim was taken from a primary source where one exists: bill text and committee records on Congress.gov and GovInfo, state statutes and codifications (California Civil Code section 3344.1, New York Civil Rights Law section 50-f, the Tennessee ELVIS Act, Washington SB 5886), the published opinion in Lehrman v. Lovo, the consolidated text of Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, official regulator material from the FTC and the European Commission, the European Parliamentary Research Service briefing on the Danish proposal, the platforms' own help documentation for Apple Legacy Contact and Google Inactive Account Manager, and the peer-reviewed and preprint literature listed below. Law firm and academic commentary was used only to corroborate dates and mechanics, never as the sole source for a claim. The description of what Afterlife.ai™ does is first-hand rather than cited, including the stated limits, and nothing in that description should be read as a legal capability, because a product cannot grant a right your jurisdiction does not give you. Unsettled as at 30 July 2026: the NO FAKES Act is a bill and may never pass, or may pass amended; the Danish Copyright Act amendments have not received final adoption and face live Commission objections; the count of US states recognising a post-mortem right differs between surveys, and the figure used here is the twenty-four counted by the USC Business Law Digest in April 2026; the FTC's individual-impersonation rule remains a proposal; and platform impersonation policies are discretionary documents that can change on any given day. Found something here that is wrong or out of date? Report an error on this page and we will correct the text and the review date.

Sources

1. S.4591, NO FAKES Act of 2026, 119th Congress. Congress.gov, bill text as introduced 20 May 2026, GovInfo and the GovInfo bill status record. Introduced 20 May 2026, ordered reported by the Senate Judiciary Committee 18 June 2026, reported and placed on the Senate calendar 24 June 2026. Not law as at 29 July 2026. The bill text is the source for the digital replica definition, the 10-year initial post-mortem term, successive 5-year renewals conditional on demonstrated active and authorised public use with a notice filed with the Register of Copyrights under penalty of perjury, the 70-year outer limit, the 10-year and 5-year licence caps, the 750,000 US dollar per work ceiling for online services that have not made a good faith effort, the 25,000 US dollar per work figure for those that have, the 14-day restoration period after a counter-notification, the no duty to monitor rule of construction, and the preemption clause preserving state causes of action in existence as of 2 January 2025 plus state laws on sexually explicit and election-related replicas.

2. Holland & Knight, "Senate Judiciary Committee Advances Legislation to Protect Name, Image, Likeness and Voice Against Unauthorized AI Use", June 2026. hklaw.com. Corroborates the 18 June 2026 vote, the 25,000 US dollar false counter-notification penalty, the preemption date and the exclusions.

3. Reed Smith, "AI and publicity rights: The No Fakes Act strikes a chord". reedsmith.com. Corroborates the post-mortem term structure and the licence caps.

4. GovTrack, NO FAKES Act of 2026 (S.4591). govtrack.us.

5. IPWatchdog, "Senate Judiciary Moves NO FAKES Act One Step Closer to Passage", 18 June 2026. ipwatchdog.com.

6. California AB 1836 (2024), Use of likeness: digital replica. California Legislative Information. Chaptered 17 September 2024, operative 1 January 2025, liability at the greater of 10,000 US dollars or actual damages.

7. California AB 2602 (2024), contract terms for digital replicas, signed 17 September 2024, operative 1 January 2025. Fenwick, "California's New AI Laws Limit Uses of Digital Likeness".

8. California Civil Code section 3344.1, subsections (b), (d), (f)(1) and (g). FindLaw. 70-year post-mortem term, the "deceased personality" commercial value definition, transferability by testamentary instrument, the statutory ladder of heirs, and the successor-in-interest registration requirement.

9. California Secretary of State, Registration of Claim as Successor in Interest, form NP-SF-407. sos.ca.gov.

10. New York Civil Rights Law section 50-f. FindLaw and the 2025 codification on Justia. Signed 1 December 2020, effective 2021, 40-year term, "deceased performer" definition for the digital replica provision.

11. Tennessee ELVIS Act (Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act), Public Chapter 588, Tenn. Code Ann. 47-25-1101 et seq., signed 21 March 2024, effective 1 July 2024. Rothman's Roadmap to the Right of Publicity, Tennessee. 10-year term, terminating after two further years without commercial exploitation, no commercial-value requirement.

12. Rothman's Roadmap, Indiana (100 years), Oklahoma (100 years, Okla. Stat. tit. 12 section 1448), Virginia (20 years), Massachusetts (no recognised post-mortem right).

13. Washington SB 5886, forged digital likeness, effective 10 June 2026, 3,000 US dollar civil penalty alongside actual damages and infringer profits. Davis Wright Tremaine, 2026.

14. Zain Almaliki, "Protect Your Face: Understanding the Right of Publicity and Recent Developments", USC Business Law Digest, 28 April 2026. lawforbusiness.usc.edu. Source for the count of twenty-four states.

15. Lehrman v. Lovo, Inc., United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, opinion of Judge J. Paul Oetken, 10 July 2025. Federal copyright and Lanham Act claims largely dismissed; New York Civil Rights Law sections 50 and 51 claims and state consumer protection claims survived. Opinion (PDF) and Crowell & Moring analysis.

16. TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed 19 May 2025; 48-hour platform removal obligation; FTC enforcement of the platform provisions from 19 May 2026. FTC business guidance, May 2026 and Congressional Research Service LSB11314.

17. FTC Trade Regulation Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses, effective 1 April 2024; supplemental notice of proposed rulemaking on impersonation of individuals announced February 2024, informal hearing on the proposed individual-impersonation prohibition held 17 January 2025, not finalised as at July 2026. Federal Register, 1 March 2024 and FTC press release, February 2024.

18. UK Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, section 138, in force 6 February 2026, creating an offence of creating or requesting a purported intimate image of an adult without consent. Queen Mary University of London Legal Advice Centre, 2026.

19. Criminal Code Amendment (Deepfake Sexual Material) Act 2024 (Cth), commenced 3 September 2024, maximum penalty six years. Parliament of Australia.

20. Google Search removal request for non-consensual explicit imagery, announced 10 February 2026. Google Search Help. The Search Help page also records the limit that removal from Search leaves the content on the site hosting the content.

21. Regulation (EU) 2024/1689 (EU AI Act), Article 50. European Commission AI Act Service Desk and European Commission transparency FAQ. Applies from 2 August 2026. Penalty tier at Article 99: up to 15,000,000 euros or 3 percent of total worldwide annual turnover.

22. Sidley, "EU AI Act Transparency Obligations: Preparing for Compliance by 2 August 2026", 24 June 2026. datamatters.sidley.com. Digital Omnibus on AI, European Parliament approval 16 June 2026, Council adoption 29 June 2026, and the Article 50(2) deferral to 2 December 2026 for systems placed on the market before 2 August 2026.

23. GDPR Recital 27, "Not applicable to data of deceased persons". gdpr-info.eu.

24. Sofia Karttunen, European Parliamentary Research Service, "The Danish approach to copyright and deepfakes: A model for the EU?", PE 782.611, January 2026. europarl.europa.eu. Two-part structure (general protection plus performers), consent requirement, 50-year post-mortem protection, enforcement through the Digital Services Act notice and action route, notification through the technical regulation information system with comments open until 3 February 2026, expected entry into force July 2026, the Danish explanatory notes disclaiming any new citizen copyright, the geo-blocking territorial limit, the Danish Presidency declaration signed by all member states except Hungary, and the Danish Culture Minister's statement that Ireland intends to follow.

25. Dennemeyer, "A new sense of self: Denmark's copyright amendment against deepfakes", 16 February 2026. dennemeyer.com. Proposed sections 65a and 73a, and the delay from the originally scheduled 31 March 2026 start following the snap general election of 24 March 2026.

26. ICTRecht, "The EC pushes back on Denmark: no copyright on your own face?", March 2026. ictrecht.nl, and COMMUNIA, 30 March 2026. European Commission objections, including the Copyright Term Directive (2006/116) point and the Article 17 filtering point.

27. Kluwer Copyright Blog, "Deepfake Bills in Denmark and the Netherlands", 6 August 2025. legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com. 50-year post-mortem term and the comparable Dutch bill.

28. Google, "About Inactive Account Manager". support.google.com. User-set waiting period, up to 10 notified contacts, selectable data with download link.

29. Apple, "How to add a Legacy Contact for your Apple Account". support.apple.com, and Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions on account non-transferability and termination of rights on death.

30. C. Wang et al., "Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers" (VALL-E), Microsoft, arXiv:2301.02111, January 2023. arxiv.org and the Microsoft Research project page. Voice synthesis from a 3-second enrolled recording.

31. Rashi Shrivastava, "Character AI Hosted A Chatbot Of A Murdered Teenager, Her Father Says", Forbes, 2 October 2024. forbes.com.

32. Tomasz Hollanek and Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, "Griefbots, Deadbots, Postmortem Avatars: on Responsible Applications of Generative AI in the Digital Afterlife Industry", Philosophy & Technology, 9 May 2024, DOI 10.1007/s13347-024-00744-w. link.springer.com. Recommendations to providers of re-creation services include sensitive procedures for retiring deadbots, meaningful transparency, adult-only access, and adherence to the principle of mutual consent of both data donors and service interactants.

33. Electronic Frontier Foundation, "The NO FAKES Act Could Silence Satire, Commentary, And News", 17 June 2026. eff.org. Source for the heckler's veto argument and the remove-first incentive.

34. Jennifer E. Rothman, "Revised No FAKES Act Still Poses Danger of Our Losing Control of our Digital Selves", Rothman's Roadmap to the Right of Publicity. rightofpublicityroadmap.com. Source for the argument that the bill protects record labels, large tech companies, the movie industry and those who profit from dead celebrities, and for the long and broad licensing objection.

35. Google, "How to request removal of non-consensual explicit images in Search", 10 February 2026. blog.google. Source for the three-dot Image Viewer flow, the multi-image form, the opt-in proactive filtering of similar searches, and the Results about you tracking hub.

36. Apple iCloud Terms and Conditions. apple.com. Account non-transferable, rights terminate on death except as allowed under Digital Legacy.

37. Council of the EU, "Artificial intelligence: Council gives final green light to simplify and streamline rules", 29 June 2026. consilium.europa.eu. Source for the Council adoption date of the Digital Omnibus on AI.

38. Federal Trade Commission, "FTC Begins Enforcing the TAKE IT DOWN Act", May 2026. ftc.gov. Source for the 19 May 2026 compliance deadline and the 48-hour removal of reported content and known identical copies.

39. Simmons & Simmons, "A masterclass in can-kicking: UK Government views on AI and copyright". simmons-simmons.com. Source for the absence of a general image right in England and Wales, and for the further deepfake consultation expected in summer 2026 covering whether to create a personality right, with no commitment to legislate.

40. Futurism, "An AI Company Published a Chatbot Based on a Murdered Woman. Her Family Is Outraged.", October 2024. futurism.com. Source for Brian Crecente being Drew Crecente's brother, a former editor-in-chief of Kotaku, and for his taking the matter public on X.

Last reviewed: 30 July 2026. The legal status of S.4591, the Danish Copyright Act amendments and the EU AI Act Article 50 timetable are unsettled, and platform policies change without notice, so this page is on a 30-day recheck cycle.

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