There is a difference between a government that has not yet legislated and a government that has no obligation to. On AI replicas of real people, the UK is in the second position, and almost nobody has noticed. Martha Crnkovic and Alishea Patel of Macfarlanes published an analysis on 6 August setting out how thin the UK’s protections for image, voice and likeness really are. Their diagnosis is right. What their piece leaves implicit is the mechanism that keeps the gap open, and it has nothing to do with drafting difficulty.
Why this gap will not close on its own
When the government published its copyright and AI report on 18 March 2026, it was discharging a statutory duty. The Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 obliged ministers, at sections 135 and 136, to report on how copyright works are used to build AI systems, against a clock Parliament set. That clock is why the transparency and text-and-data-mining questions got a document at all, and why the government’s retreat from its preferred copyright approach had to be written down rather than quietly dropped.
Digital replicas were not part of that duty. The report says so directly: they sit alongside computer-generated works as topics the same consultation covered but the Act did not require. The government’s own words on what happens next are that it will consider “whether it would be beneficial to introduce a new digital replica or personality right”. Explore. Consider. No date, no draft, no trigger.
Strategic Reality: The one part of the AI-and-identity problem that touches every UK citizen, rather than only rights holders, is the part with no statutory deadline attached. Copyright reform moves because a statute made it move. Likeness reform moves only if a minister decides it should.
Read the evidence section of that report and the case looks overwhelming. The government accepts that AI has made convincing replicas cheap and easy to produce at scale, and that “existing laws may not protect the public sufficiently as they increasingly experience imitation in everyday life without their consent”. Warner Music Group and Sony Music told the consultation that several thousand unauthorised voice clones of their artists had appeared on streaming services. Equity told it that performers’ data protection rights are not being enforced through the courts. The conclusion that follows all this evidence is a proposal to explore options.
What the timetable actually looks like
| Date | What it does | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 18 March 2026 | UK copyright and AI report published; digital replicas addressed outside the statutory reporting duty | Government proposes to explore options; no consultation date announced |
| 2 August 2026 | EU AI Act Article 50 transparency duties begin to apply to providers and deployers | Live |
| 2 December 2026 | Grace period ends for generative systems already on the EU market before 2 August, for machine-readable marking of outputs | Pending |
The middle row is the one UK boardrooms have under-read. The EU AI Act’s Article 50 started applying on 2 August, eight days ago. It requires deployers to label deepfakes clearly enough that an ordinary person notices on first exposure, and the European Commission has been explicit that a deployer cannot discharge that duty by pointing to the machine-readable marking the provider embedded. Penalties reach 3% of worldwide annual turnover, or 15 million euros.
Critical Context: The UK’s decision not to legislate does not give UK companies a lighter regime. It gives them the EU’s regime by default if they have any EU exposure, because no marketing team is going to run two content pipelines with different labelling rules. What it removes is the reciprocal protection a UK likeness right would have given UK individuals.
What the celebrity trade mark filings are really telling you
Macfarlanes uses two filings to show how far people are stretching existing law. The darts player Luke Littler now holds a UK registration over a photograph showing his face, filed with the Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) across 11 classes that run from darts equipment through to advertising services. Taylor Swift has gone narrower in the US, with a figurative service mark built around one performance look: a pose, a pink guitar, an iridescent bodysuit.
Both are ingenious and both are narrow. Infringement requires a sign that is identical or similar, and a synthetic image of that same person in a different pose is not obviously similar to a registered photograph. There is a deeper obstacle underneath that one. A trade mark has to function as an indicator of trade origin, and it is far from obvious that consumers read someone’s face that way. A fraudulent advert using a cloned public figure deceives people about identity, not about who supplies the goods. As the Macfarlanes authors put it, “trade mark law protects marks, not identity”.
Passing off is the usual fallback and it has a well-known distribution problem: it requires goodwill, misrepresentation and damage. That combination is available to the famous and effectively unavailable to everyone else. The government’s report reaches the same conclusion and adds that its application to unauthorised replicas has never been tested in court.
Data protection is where practitioners actually go. Our earlier reporting on the patchwork covering AI voice cloning found lawyers describing GDPR as the tool they deploy in desperation rather than by design. It bites because cloning a person means processing their personal data. It was not built to stop the commercial deployment of a synthetic person, and it does not.
Reality Check: Three regimes each catch part of the problem and none catches the middle of it. That is not a patchwork with holes. It is three separate fabrics that were never cut for this garment.
The deal everyone cites has not closed
The emerging market in personality assets is where the analysis gets most interesting, and where I would push back on the framing.
Macfarlanes describes the Khaby Lame transaction as the example of how a digital twin changes deal mechanics: Lame’s company, Step Distinctive Limited, sold to Rich Sparkle Holdings, a Hong Kong firm, in a deal reported at 975 million US dollars that handed over worldwide exclusivity to commercialise an AI twin of him for 36 months. The drafting problems the authors identify from that structure are real and well argued. A digital twin is a live asset that both sides can damage.
The trouble is what happened next. TheWrap reported that Rich Sparkle’s shares have fallen more than 90% from their January peak, that brokers including Fidelity and Vanguard have blocked or restricted trading in the stock, and that an SEC filing dated 31 March states the deal has not completed and that completion depends on due diligence and stock exchange approval. Lame has removed the company’s ticker from his Instagram and TikTok profiles. Alicia Weaver, a vice president for media activation at the agency Mediassociates, called it “a textbook cautionary tale”.
So the flagship transaction in this supposed asset class is an all-stock deal, from a counterparty with no track record in creator partnerships, valued off a projection of four billion dollars in sales that one lawyer quoted by TheWrap called “a number out of the blue”. It may yet complete. It is not a template.
Hidden Cost: When the market’s headline comparable turns out to be unconfirmed, every valuation anchored to it inherits the problem. If your board has seen a likeness-licensing proposal benchmarked against a 975 million dollar figure, the benchmark is a press release, not a closed transaction.
That does not weaken the legal argument. It sharpens it. The reason a deal like this can be announced, valued and half-unwound without any authority examining whether the underlying likeness rights were capable of being transferred at all is precisely that no such right exists to examine.
Who this actually lands on
| Who | Where the exposure sits | What bites first |
|---|---|---|
| UK brands and advertisers | Synthetic endorsement content produced in-house or by agencies | EU Article 50 labelling if any EU distribution; ASA rules and passing off at home |
| Public figures and creators | Licensing likeness into multi-year deals with no statutory floor | Contract terms alone; no fallback right if the counterparty misuses the twin |
| Businesses deploying AI avatars | Customer service, sales, training, multilingual content | Whether the individuals behind the avatar consented in terms broad enough to cover generative reuse |
| Ordinary employees and members of the public | Cloned in scams, harassment, fraudulent endorsement | Little beyond data protection and, in the worst cases, criminal law |
The last row is why this stops being a creative-industries story. The Bank of England had to publicly warn the public after deepfake footage of Governor Andrew Bailey circulated in scam adverts. Equity has been assembling coordinated action over unauthorised use of members’ images because individual claims are not viable. Neither of those is a problem a trade mark registration solves.
What to do while the law stays still
If you licence or acquire likeness rights, the contract is the whole of your protection, so draft it as though nothing else exists. Three things need to be on the page and usually are not. First, a defined standard for what counts as reputational damage in both directions, with a termination trigger attached, because both the individual and the licensee can devalue the asset during the term. Second, explicit allocation of ownership in generated outputs, sublicensing, campaign analytics and training data, plus what survives termination or death, since English law has not settled whether copyright subsists in AI outputs at all. Third, a change-of-law clause that anticipates a UK digital replica right arriving mid-term, including who bears the cost of compliance and whether the individual can withdraw consent that a new statute makes withdrawable.
If you deploy synthetic likenesses rather than trade in them, the practical answer is to adopt the EU’s Article 50 labelling as your global default now. Running one compliant pipeline is cheaper than running two, and the UK’s eventual rules are more likely to converge on that standard than to undercut it.
If you are an individual signing something, register what you can, but treat the registration as evidence of intent rather than as protection. The Littler filing is worth having. It will not stop a replica of him in a different pose.
Implementation Note: There is a live drafting question that most templates get wrong. Some rights attaching to a person cannot be fully assigned, including moral rights in works and the own-name defence in trade mark law. A contract that purports to transfer “all rights in likeness” is transferring less than it says. Identify the unassignable elements explicitly and licence around them rather than papering over them.
The takeaway
The UK does not have a likeness problem it is working through. It has a likeness problem nothing obliges it to work through, which is a different and slower thing. The copyright questions moved because Parliament wrote a deadline into statute. The replica questions have no deadline, and the government’s chosen verb is “explore”.
Three things follow for anyone with commercial exposure here. Your contracts are load-bearing in a way they are not in jurisdictions with a right of publicity, so they deserve specialist drafting rather than a template. Your labelling practice is already governed by Brussels if you touch the EU at all, so decide deliberately whether to run one standard or two. And your valuation assumptions about likeness as an asset class should not rest on a transaction that has not closed.
A checklist worth running this quarter: identify every workflow in your organisation that generates or distributes synthetic depictions of a real person; confirm whether any of it reaches EU users; audit existing talent and creator contracts for generative reuse language written before 2024; and decide who owns the answer when the UK consultation eventually opens, so you are responding rather than reading about it afterwards.
Sources and further reading
This analysis responds to “Protect yourself at all times: the UK’s legal gap on AI digital twins” by Macfarlanes, written by Martha Crnkovic and Alishea Patel and published on 6 August 2026.
Supporting material: the UK government’s Report on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence (18 March 2026); the European Commission’s FAQ on Article 50 transparency obligations; and TheWrap’s reporting on the status of the Rich Sparkle transaction.
Original analysis by Resultsense. Related coverage: AI voice cloning outpaces UK law and the EU AI Act omnibus deal.