Denmark seems to be pursuing the idea of protecting people from "AI" deep fakes by addressing people's image as part of copyright law. [1]
I applaud the idea of doing something about this, and this is a better approach than none at all, but it's not quite how I would pursue it.
For one thing, there are a number of places where people are innocently captured in images that this will create complications for. And for another, I don't think it's powerful enough to address the real problem.
The "MOO" community (MOO is MUD, Object-Oriented, and MUD is Multiple-User Dungeon, and Dungeon was one of the first text-based interactive fiction games, also called Zork), this came up a long time ago. Ironically, since MOO is entirely text, images were not involved. But there was still the issue of appropriating people's view of themselves for ill purposes, and this was richly discussed.
MOO, which had its greatest popularity in the 1990's, before Second Life overshadowed it, functioned as a kind of textual sketch of things to come. It was a coarse level of detail because its technical layer doesn't allow for super-elaborate detailing, but that forced the social aspect to be the focus rather than the technology. Modern systems purport to capture reality, but they often get so side-tracked on making things photo-real visceral experiences that they give short shrift to the full complexity of human social interaction. So they're still catching up to some of the social issues MOO explored decades ago.
In Julian Dibbell's fascinating book "My Tiny Life: Crime and Passion in a Virtual World", which you can and should buy if you can afford to, but which the author arranged to be freely downloadable as a PDF for those who could not afford it [2], the focus is on "A Rape In Cyberspace", he explores some of these issues. Originally published in The Village Voice and later adapted for a book, this story is, in the author's words, "a True Account of the Case of the Infamous Mr. Bungle, and of the Author's Journey, in Consequence Thereof, to the Heart of a Half-Real World Called LambdaMOO".
This story will not tell you how to understand what Denmark is doing, but I think it informs my way of thinking about this issue.
At its core, both situations--the issue in cyberspace and the modern issues in the real world--are not "infringements" (in the way copyright would talk about them) but "violations" in the way a person's sense of self matters.
Some people will point to rape as a matter of physical violation, but just as others are quick to say it's not a crime of sex, it's a crime of violence, I would similarly say it's a crime of violation, of taking control of a person's sense of self. And that's what's in common with these other matters, like grabbing someone's image.
We don't presently have a standard for this, and like many matters of human endeavor, there is extraordinary nuance. Fair use, one might say. Certainly parody is one place where people don't have complete say. The sitting President wants to go after critics for disparaging his good name, for example, and ordinarily the disparaging of someone's good name might be seen as a violation, but in certain realms of public discourse, especially for public figures, we allow and insist on it.
This is partly true, too, because even underlying the issue of violation is the issue of power. The law is really at its core protecting those powerless to protect themselves. So, for example, while it might be a violation to appropriate the good work of an actor who's just struggling to eat, selling their image royalty-free, appropriating the name of a politician who can with the stroke of a pen cut the food supply of millions is not exactly exerting power over them, certainly not unconditionally dominating power.
So we should be careful in our understanding of good law to understand that it seeks not a bright line of pain to itself become a weapon, but rather just an ability to tip power balances back toward the middle, making the world an even battle among people who are born into different levels of power and who cannot therefore fairly be expected to solve their own problems.
I've swept through many issues here, but I have decades of thought underlying my reaction to Denmark's idea, informed by the lucky accident that I was there at the time LambdaMOO sketched the future.
I sometimes note in conversations with people for whom a topic is new and hypothetical that they will say "I wonder what would happen if..." and I reply in the past tense saying "Oh, this is what happened." Because I don't have to speculate. I saw it. It mightn't happen reliably that way again. Many possibilities were in play. But even those were tangibly close to my experience. I have rich, detailed thought because I lived at least one version of it. Just wanted to share that.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/07/deepfake-legislation-denmark-digital-id/
[2] https://epdf.pub/my-tiny-life-crime-and-passion-in-a-virtual-world.html
#AI #IP #Law #Crime #Copyright #DeepFake #DeepFakes #violation #rape
