Sponsors (11)
Official title: To protect intellectual property rights in the voice and visual likeness of individuals, and for other purposes.
Introduced April 9, 2025 by Maria Elvira Salazar · Last progress April 9, 2025
The bill creates strong, transferable rights and enforcement tools for individuals over digital replicas while setting predictable notice-and-takedown procedures and protecting network carriers — but it shifts compliance costs and liability onto platforms, risks increased takedowns of legitimate speech, narrows state-law remedies, and adds administrative burdens for rights holders.
Individuals (living or deceased) gain an exclusive, transferable legal right to authorize and license use of their voice or visual likeness in digital replicas, giving them control and potential revenue from commercial uses.
Right holders can sue for unauthorized public distribution of digital replicas and recover actual damages plus disgorged profits and equitable relief, strengthening enforcement and deterrence against misuse.
The law preserves many expressive uses (news, documentary, commentary, satire) and excludes fleeting/negligible uses, protecting common First Amendment activities from liability.
End users and creators face increased risk of content removal or deplatforming because platforms must act on notices and narrower 'user uploaded material' definitions may push legitimate speech offline.
Online platforms face significant new liability exposure if they fail to remove identified content quickly or are found to hold an unreasonable belief about a replica’s status, creating legal risk even where context is limited.
Platforms will incur additional compliance costs (registration fees, monitoring, takedown operations) and potential large damages awards, costs that could be passed onto users or raise barriers for smaller services.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Creates definitions and a new legal right controlling AI-generated voice and visual "digital replicas," and sets which online services are covered.
Creates legal definitions and a new individual right that governs highly realistic computer-generated reproductions of a person’s voice or visual likeness (called “digital replicas”). It defines key terms (digital fingerprint, digital replica, individual, interactive computer service, right holder), identifies which online platforms are covered, and exempts certain authorized creative uses. The text sets rules about which online services qualify for coverage (including websites, apps, certain music services, and services that register a Copyright Office agent) and clarifies that the new right covers both living and deceased persons. The bill text provided establishes the framework and definitions but does not include enforcement details or changes to existing Section 230 law in the excerpt shown.