The Copyrighted Face: Denmark, Deepfakes, and the Struggle for Data Sovereignty

When your face becomes intellectual property, the battle for data sovereignty stops being abstract, it becomes personal, visible, and for sale.

SOURCE: Denmark Leads EU Push to Copyright Faces in Fight Against Deepfakes

I. The Ghost in the Portrait: A Historical Prelude

In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis penned what would become the most influential law review article in American jurisprudence: “The Right to Privacy.” Their motivation was visceral and immediate. Warren’s wife had been subjected to invasive society page coverage; her private moments had been rendered public spectacle by the emerging technologies of photography and tabloid journalism. The solution they proposed was revolutionary: a legal right “to be let alone,” a barrier between the intimate self and the consuming gaze of publicity.

What made their argument radical was not merely its recognition of privacy as a right, but its acknowledgment that technology had fundamentally altered the nature of exposure. The photograph, they understood, was not simply a recording device; it was a weapon of replication, capable of divorcing image from context, presence fro…