Denmark Hopes to Combat Deepfakes Through Copyright Laws

AI portrait of actress Sydney Sweeney generated by Stable Diffusion (Photo: Torsten Behrens via Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0)

In the span of only a few years, AI technology has already improved dramatically. Now, the tool can produce entire images that are so similar to reality that it’s difficult to detect where fact ends and fiction begins. Amid growing concerns about AI-generated deepfakes, Denmark is leading the charge with a seemingly unprecedented solution.

Late last month, the Danish government announced its plans to strictly regulate the creation and dissemination of deepfakes by adjusting their copyright laws. These amendments would ensure that people essentially have “copyright” over their own faces, voices, and identities, rendering it illegal in most cases to share deepfakes of others without their consent. The proposal has attracted broad cross-party support, and will be submitted for consultation before the summer recess with hopes to submit the amendment this fall.

“In the bill we agree and are sending an unequivocal message that everybody has the right to their own body, their own voice, and their own facial features, which is apparently not how the current law is protecting people against generative AI,” Jakob Engel-Schmidt, Denmark’s culture minister, told The Guardian. “Human beings can be run through the digital copy machine and be misused for all sorts of purposes and I’m not willing to accept that.”

The bill encompasses everything from “very realistic digital representations” of people to “realistic, digitally generated imitations” of an artist’s performance without consent. In other words, Danish citizens would gain the ability to request the removal of non-consensual, deepfake content from digital platforms. Parodies and satire, however, will not be affected by the proposed law.

“Of course this is new ground we are breaking, and if the platforms are not complying with that, we are willing to take additional steps,” Engel-Schmidt said. If platforms don’t comply, Engel-Schmidt added that they could be subject to “severe fines” and even be within the purview of the European Commission.

According to the Danish government, this bill is the first of its kind in Europe, one that it hopes will influence other countries in the European Union, of which Denmark recently assumed presidency. It also offers an innovative and proactive approach to combating deepfakes, given that current regulations typically only concern specific cases such as pornography or misinformation.

“It’s not saying, ‘We’re targeting this specific harm,’” Henry Ajder, an expert on AI and deepfakes, told The New York Times. “It’s saying, ‘This is how we think about identity in the synthetic age.’”

Francesco Cavalli, COO of Sensity AI, a company that provides deepfake detection tools, echoed the sentiment: “This is definitely a new approach that no one else has experimented with yet.”

Even so, Cavalli cautioned that, though Denmark may be “granting a new right,” the “real-world impact could be minimal” if the “mechanisms to enforce it are slow, burdensome, or inconsistent.”

“Regulation without enforcement is a signal, not a shield,” he concluded.

Still, Denmark’s attitude toward deepfakes is radical and, in an era of eroding personal autonomy, necessary.

Denmark is leading the charge against AI-generated deepfakes with suggested amendments to copyright law, which will protect people’s faces, voices, and identities.