In June 2025, the Danish government together with a number of opposition parties jointly proposed the establishment of a safeguard against the sharing of digital imitations by amending the Copyright Act by introducing two protections: 1) A general protection against realistic digitally generated imitations of personal characteristics; and (2) An imitation protection for performing artists. Today, COMMUNIA submitted comments to the consultation on the proposed law (available as a PDF file).
COMMUNIA welcomes measures aimed at protecting private individuals, as well as performing artists, against AI-generated deepfakes, insofar as such safeguards cannot already be derived from the existing legal framework. Copyright does not constitute an appropriate basis for protecting a natural person’s likeness, however. A general personality right is a more appropriate framework for addressing misuse of a person’s likeness and other personal indicia. As to performing artists, related rights may be the adequate legal remedy to address the identified harms caused by digital imitations of their performances. Yet the draft bill exceeds this mandate by extending protection to subject matter that does not constitute a performance of a literary or artistic work. The introduction of a new exclusive right for entertainers who do not perform original works would unduly restrict the Public Domain and should be strongly opposed.
