I hope the audio quality is not terrible!
Sources:
- “Manipulating reality: the intersection of deepfakes and the law”
- “The Deepfake Conundrum: Balancing Innovation, Privacy, and Intellectual Property in the Digital Age”
- “New York Based Celebrities and Performers Can Now Pass to their Heirs the Rights to License their Name”
- CASE OF VON HANNOVER v. GERMANY (No. 2)
- Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (as amended on September 28, 1979)
- “The High Stakes of Deepfakes: The Growing Necessity of Federal Legislation to Regulate This Rapidly Evolving Technology”
- “Deepfakes and scientific knowledge dissemination”
Communications Law
If you don’t have a regular podcast, you should start one! Thank you for introducing such a new and concerning topic!
A famous person’s image and likeness being protected in the same way as identity makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, I think theres a case to be made for protecting non-famous people’s images and likeness for the same reasons you spoke of. Those factors do not only apply to famous people who profit off of their image, but regular people who depend on their reputation (just like the first thing we learn in law school — “Your reputation is everything”), but protecting it with IP law seems a bit counterintuitive. It seems as if the IP legislation that has developed internationally is more concerned with allowing deepfakes than limiting them. For example, as you explained in the US, deepfakes are allowed where they are transforming those images to produce something distinct. My impression is that this would not necessarily be a very high bar to meet, though perhaps I’m wrong!
My understanding is also that Canada has not yet legislated on the topic. I can only speculate as to why, but could imagine that we might be hesitant to recognize deep fake creation as protected in any IP form due to its being created by AI, and the various avenues that subjects of deep fakes have to fight them (you mentioned identity theft and defamation) are sufficient for now. I’m not sure I see the need for recognizing deep fakes as intellectual property at all under the Canadian definition. I might be missing something big, but maybe that’s good news for your fears about deep fakes becoming more and more of a danger!