Lawmakers Reintroduce Revised No Fakes Act to Restrict Deepfakes

Deadline reports that lawmakers reintroduced a revised No Fakes Act on May 20, 2026, a bill intended to regulate unauthorized digital replicas of a person's voice and likeness. Deadline reports the bill grants individuals the right to authorize such digital replication, and that the digital replication right does not expire at a person's death; Deadline reports it can be transferred by heirs and executors and, per the bill text as reported, terminates no longer than 70 years after death. Deadline reports the legislation contains a "counter-notice" procedure to challenge removals and exemptions for libraries, archives, and research institutions, and that it already provided exclusions for news, documentary, sports, biographical works, comment, criticism, and parody. Deadline reports sponsors named in the reintroduction include Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) and Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA). Deadline also reports that an earlier version had backing from performers and companies including YouTube, Amazon, and OpenAI, and cites the viral 2023 example using voices attributed to Drake and The Weeknd.

Industry observers working with generative audio and synthetic media often confront rights and consent complexity when models reproduce identifiable voices or likenesses. Companies and creators typically need clearer workflows for provenance, rights clearance, metadata labeling, and opt-in consent capture when a legal right of control exists. Watermarking and robust attribution practices appear as standard mitigations in similar regulatory environments.

Industry context: Legislation that creates transferable or post-mortem digital-rights, and that codifies counter-notice and exemptions, tends to reshape platform moderation rules, licensing marketplaces, and post-production workflows for synthetic media. For practitioners, this raises operational questions around dataset curation, permission records, and compliance tooling.

Observers should track committee hearings, amendment text, industry stakeholder submissions, and how major platforms update developer and content policies if the bill gains traction. Deadline has not published direct quotes from bill authors explaining rationale beyond the reintroduction coverage.