New federal law gives heirs control over your likeness for 70 years after death.
H.R. 8915 — NO FAKES Act of 2026 · Filed by Maria Salazar (R-FL) · 11 cosponsors · Introduced May 20, 2026 · Referred to committee
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What it does
The NO FAKES Act creates a new federal property right in a person's voice and visual likeness, protecting against unauthorized AI-generated digital replicas. It grants individuals and their heirs the exclusive right to authorize use of their likeness in deepfakes and similar synthetic media, establishes liability for platforms and creators who distribute unauthorized replicas without consent, and creates a notice-and-takedown system similar to copyright law. The right survives death and can be licensed or inherited, with statutory damages ranging from $5,000 to $750,000 per violation.
Why we flagged it
The bill's core mechanism is the creation of a new, perpetual, inheritable property right in voice and likeness, coupled with a DMCA-style notice-and-takedown regime. While framed as anti-deepfake protection, the operative effect is to grant individuals and their estates exclusive control over synthetic media use of their likeness for up to 70 years post-mortem, with broad liability for platforms and creators.
What the text implies
- Post-mortem right extends 70 years after death, allowing heirs with no connection to the original person to control use of their likeness and suppress unflattering portrayals, documentaries, or historical commentary indefinitely.
- The 'fleeting or negligible' exception to liability is undefined and will likely generate litigation; a single frame of a deepfake in a news segment could trigger $5,000–$750,000 liability depending on platform compliance.
- Platforms face tiered liability: $25,000 per work if they 'undertook good faith effort' to comply, but $750,000 per work if they did not—creating pressure to over-remove content and chill legitimate speech to avoid catastrophic damages.
- The bill preempts state laws protecting likeness rights but carves out state laws on deepfakes depicting sexual conduct and election-related deepfakes, creating a patchwork where federal law is narrower than some state protections.
- Collective bargaining agreements can override the 5-year minor license limit and other protections, potentially allowing studios to lock in perpetual rights to child performers' likenesses at the time of hire.
Section numbers refer to the bill text the analysis read — linked under Primary records below.
Who it affects
The bill protects individuals from non-consensual deepfakes and synthetic media impersonation—a genuine public harm—but simultaneously creates a perpetual, inheritable property right in likeness that may restrict legitimate speech (satire, parody, news, commentary) and could be weaponized by heirs or licensees to suppress unflattering portrayals decades after death. The safe harbors for news, satire, and parody are meaningful but narrow, and the 'fleeting or negligible' exception is undefined.
Who stands to gain
- entertainment industry talent and estates
- rights management and licensing intermediaries
- legal services (litigation and licensing)
- digital fingerprinting and content identification technology providers
Named in the bill
Register of Copyrights, Copyright Office, online service providers, digital music providers, sound recording artists, right holders, district courts
Where it stands
11 cosponsors: 7 Democrats, 4 Republicans.
- May 20, 2026 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in House”
- May 20, 2026 — Referred to House Committee on the Judiciary · Congress.gov: “Referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
10 lobbying clients named this bill on 12 disclosure filings across 1 quarter, Jun 2026 to Jun 2026. Those filings disclosed $11,148,852 in lobbying spend. A filing names 13 bills on average, so that figure is what each filing reported, not a share belonging to this bill.
More lobbying clients named this bill than 91% of bills with at least one filing.
Maria Salazar, the sponsor, reported $541,848 in PAC receipts in the 2026 cycle.
- American Medical Association — $5,643,000 on 2 filings
- Recording Industry Association of America — $2,206,361 on 1 filing
- Universal Music Group — $1,460,000 on 2 filings
- Entertainment Software Association — $1,390,000 on 1 filing
- Digital Media Assn — $148,713 on 1 filing
Lobbying Disclosure Act filings through Jul 21, 2026. A filing shows who paid to lobby on a bill it names, not what changed.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the bill text published by Congress.gov (39,677 characters) on Aug 14, 2026. Section numbers in the findings refer to that text, linked below; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 16,222 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Jun 2026 to Jun 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 21, 2026 · page rendered 2026-10-20.
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