TECHNOLOGY / IDENTITY
The Copyright Problem with a Face
An inquiry into the legal status of computational likenesses and the splintering of post-biological property rights.
INTRODUCTION
When likeness can be generated, reproduced and deployed, what exactly belongs to the person?
WHAT CHANGES WHEN A LIKENESS CAN BE GENERATED?
A photograph records a person.
A synthetic likeness can construct a representation of that person without reproducing any particular photograph.
That difference matters because the interests involved are no longer necessarily the same.
The person may care about how their identity is represented.
A photographer may own rights in an image.
A company may have created the system that generated the representation.
A platform may distribute it.
A viewer may recognise it as someone real.
The legal question is therefore becoming more complicated than who owns the image.
It is also about who has the authority to create, reproduce and commercially use a representation that derives its value from being recognisably someone else.
Copyright may answer some of those questions.
Other areas of law may answer others.
But the underlying problem remains: a person's likeness is becoming easier to reproduce than the legal categories used to protect it.
A face has always been personal.
Technology is making it reproducible.
The unresolved question is whether reproducibility changes who has the right to control it.