- United States
- N.Y.
- Letter
Please vote against the NO FAKES Act. The bill's stated goal — stopping harmful AI impersonations — is legitimate, but the way it's written would suppress satire, parody, commentary, and news reporting that Americans have every right to produce and share.
The bill imports the worst features of DMCA-style notice-and-takedown into a much broader category of expression. Platforms facing penalties of up to $750,000 per work will simply remove content first and sort it out later — giving bad actors a heckler's veto over legal speech. Worse, the new federal "likeness" right can be licensed or transferred, meaning a background actor or anyone clicking through a terms-of-service agreement could permanently hand control of their own face and voice to someone else, with federal enforcement behind it.
A coalition including the ACLU, EFF, Fight for the Future, and Public Knowledge has called to reject this approach and pursue narrowly tailored solutions instead. Real harms from AI impersonation deserve real remedies — not a sweeping new intellectual property right that chills free expression for everyone.