The NO FAKES Act: a federal right to your own face, and how ProtectMyFace will support it on day one
The NO FAKES Act would give every person a federal right over their voice and likeness. Here's what it does, where it stands, and how ProtectMyFace will support filing under it the moment it's law.
A law catching up to the problem
For most of the internet's life, the law has treated your face as fair game. State right-of-publicity rules generally kicked in only when someone used your image to sell something, leaving ordinary people with little recourse when their photo was stolen, reposted, or run through an AI generator. The NO FAKES Act is the most serious federal attempt yet to close that gap.
The full name is the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act. At its core, it would create a federal intellectual property right in your voice and visual likeness, giving every person, not just celebrities, the ability to control unauthorized AI-generated replicas of themselves and to seek removal and damages when those replicas appear without consent.
Where the bill stands right now
This is important to be precise about: the NO FAKES Act is not yet law. The 2026 version (S. 4591 in the Senate, H.R. 8915 in the House) was reintroduced on May 20, 2026, and on June 18 the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced it on a unanimous vote, sending it toward the full Senate.
Clearing committee is a real milestone, especially unanimously, but the bill still has to pass the full Senate, be passed by the House in identical form, and be signed by the President before it takes effect. It is the fourth iteration of a bill that has circulated since 2023, and it carries the broadest coalition of support so far, spanning the recording industry, Hollywood studios, labor unions, and major technology companies. That backing improves its odds, but passage is not guaranteed.
What counts as a "digital replica"
The bill targets what it calls a digital replica: a newly created, highly realistic, computer-generated representation that is readily identifiable as a specific person's voice or visual likeness. This covers two situations. The first is fully synthetic content in which the person never actually appeared. The second is a real image, video, or recording of the person that has been materially altered, which is where AI edits of someone's genuine photo come in.
Two limits are worth understanding, because they shape how far the protection reaches. The "highly realistic" threshold means the bill is aimed at content that looks like a real photograph or recording, so obviously cartoonish or clearly fabricated edits may fall outside it. And the bill carves out expression protected by the First Amendment, including parody, satire, news reporting, commentary, biographical works, and scholarship. These carve-outs are meant to protect legitimate speech, but they also mean that whether a given image is covered can come down to context and intent, which is something reasonable people, and courts, may disagree about.
What it means for ordinary people
The most significant shift is who the law protects. Earlier publicity frameworks worked best for famous people with obvious commercial value. The NO FAKES Act extends a protectable interest to everyone, and the right survives death, so heirs can inherit and license it rather than seeing a person's likeness become a free-for-all.
In practice, that means the targets of everyday abuse, the person whose face is swapped into a fake profile, whose real photos are turned into an explicit deepfake, or who is impersonated in a scam ad, would have a federal basis to demand removal and pursue claims, rather than relying on a patchwork of state laws that may not apply to them.
The penalties for non-compliance
The bill is enforced primarily through private civil claims rather than government fines, meaning the money flows to the person whose likeness was misused. Statutory damages scale by who the violator is: roughly $5,000 per work for an individual, rising to as much as $750,000 per work for a non-compliant online service that knowingly hosts unauthorized replicas. Because damages are assessed per work, exposure can compound quickly when the same replica is copied and re-uploaded across a platform.
There is also a $25,000 penalty aimed at people who abuse the takedown system itself by knowingly filing a false counter-notification, a safeguard meant to deter bad-faith claims on both sides. Platforms that follow the notice-and-takedown and repeat-violator requirements can stay inside a safe harbor and avoid the large per-work liability, so the $750,000 figure is the ceiling for services that fail to comply.
How it fits with the laws already in effect
The NO FAKES Act would not arrive in a vacuum. Two tools already exist that ProtectMyFace uses today:
**The TAKE IT DOWN Act:** This 2025 federal law requires platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate imagery, including AI-generated deepfakes, within 48 hours of a valid notice. It is the right instrument when content is sexual or has been altered to appear so.
**DMCA copyright takedowns:** When your original photos are reposted without permission, the copyright in those images gives you a direct route to removal through the hosting provider and a de-indexing request to search engines.
The gap these leave is non-sexual misuse: the realistic AI edit posted to mock you, the impersonation profile, the unauthorized commercial use that isn't covered by intimate-image law and isn't always a clean copyright case. That is the space the NO FAKES Act is designed to fill, by making the unauthorized replica itself actionable.
How ProtectMyFace will support it on day one
ProtectMyFace covers both halves of the problem: finding the misuse and acting on it. We continuously scan the internet for your face, and when we find a match we hand you the source URL, a timestamp, a screenshot, and a confidence score, then file the takedown for you with the evidence already organized. Today that filing goes out under the TAKE IT DOWN Act for nonconsensual sexual content and the DMCA for stolen photos, from one button.
The NO FAKES Act would be a third instrument in that same flow. When it takes effect, the day it becomes law, we add it as another filing path, so a verified match can be acted on under the new federal right wherever it applies. Nothing about how you use the tool changes. You just get one more law to file under.