Imagine waking up to find an identical version of yourself promoting products on social media. It’s your same face, same voice, same exact gestures you make when you talk—except you never recorded any of the video yourself. That’s not a dystopian hypothetical anymore. Today, it’s an emerging business model that allows one person’s identity to be valued at nearly a billion dollars. But did you know that Intellectual Property (IP) could potentially come to the rescue? This blog post will explain how. First, though, let me explain the commercial context.
The First Ever $975 Million Identity Monetization Deal
In January 2026, Khaby Lame, a Senegalese-Italian TikToker with over 160 million followers, sold his company for nearly a billion dollars to Rich Sparkle Holdings, a Nasdaq-listed company out of Hong Kong. The buyer projects over $4 billion in annual sales from the deal.
What exactly did they buy? Not a content library, and not a brand deal roster. They bought the right to build and deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) powered digital twin of a living human being—trained on his face, his voice, and his mannerisms. Lame’s digital twin is capable of generating entirely new performances in multiple languages, around the clock, without Lame ever showing up to record. The product isn’t his past videos. The product is him. He is infinitely reproducible, always available, and never tired.
This is genuinely new territory, and it raises an uncomfortable question. If Khaby Lame can authorize this, what stops someone from doing it to you without asking, especially as AI tools become more accessible?
Introducing the Right of Publicity
The right of publicity is the legal doctrine that gives individuals control over the commercial use of their own identity: their name, their likeness, their voice, and the broader combination traits that make them recognizable. It developed because society recognizes that a person’s identity has commercial value, and that allowing others to exploit that value without permission is a form of taking something that doesn’t belong to them. Whether its implied endorsement, free-riding on someone’s fame, or just using their image without asking, the right of publicity protects the value someone builds in their own identity.
To bring a claim, you generally need to establish three things: (1) that someone used a recognizable aspect of your identity, (2) that the use was for commercial purposes, and (3) that you never gave permission for it. The precise elements vary by jurisdiction.
How is right of publicity different than other types of IP? Unlike copyright, which protects the original creative works you create, the right of publicity protects who you are. And unlike a trademark, which protects the consumer association between a logo or name and a particular commercial source, the right of publicity protects the commercial value of your identity as a person. It’s the only IP doctrine specifically designed to prevent someone from profiting off your identity without your consent.
Where the Right of Publicity Comes into Play
Lame’s deal with Rich Sparkle is the authorized version of this story. He signed a contract granting Rich Sparkle rights to develop and deploy his digital twin, and both parties agreed to the terms. The right of publicity comes into play in the unauthorized version: when someone builds a digital replica of Lame, or of anyone else, without permission.
Take the case of an unauthorized AI replica running product endorsements or appearing in sponsored content. All three elements are easily met: someone is using a recognizable identity (element one), for a commercial purpose (element two), without permission (element three).
To make this concrete, consider more examples. Imagine a program creating an AI video of a well-known artist appearing to endorse a product. The artist never agreed, never recorded the content, and never authorized the association. That’s a digital twin implicating the right of publicity.
Similarly, picture an AI program that clones a micro-influencer simply because the tools are accessible and the laws in the relevant jurisdiction are vague. This scenario is closer to a present reality than most people realize. The tools to replicate someone’s identity are already widely available to anyone with enough photos and audio to work from.
The Problem? It Depends.
Here’s where the legal patchwork becomes a vulnerability. There is no federal right of publicity law, which means that protection depends entirely on a fragmented collection of state statutes and common law doctrines. These vary significantly in scope, duration, and strength. Roughly half of U.S. states don’t have meaningful frameworks at all. Even more complex is that it can be hard to know what state law even applies. Although you may assume it is based on where you live, courts apply a “conflicts of law” analysis to decide which state law applies, and that often turns on where the defendant acted, not where the plaintiff resides. So even if you live in a state that has good protection, if the relevant law is from a different state, the person or entity exploiting your likeness may face minimal, if any, recourse.
Although knowing the relevant state law that might apply to an unknown actor is something you can’t control, some states are starting to address AI issues with right of publicity. Tennessee passed the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security (ELVIS) Act in 2024 to specifically cover AI-generated vocal replicas, a direct response to what the music industry saw coming. Illinois updated its Right of Publicity Act in 2025 to address digital replicas of voice, image, and likeness. In 2021, New York amended its Civil Rights Law to extend protections to deceased individuals. These are meaningful steps, each one reflecting a legislature that recognizes the past framework wasn’t adequate for the realities of modern AI.
Yet, these state laws remain patches addressing a problem on a national scale.
Copyright Won’t Save You. Neither Will Trademark.
Most other IP laws are federal and thus apply uniformly in all states. Unfortunately, they don’t cover the same scenarios as the right of publicity.
Outside of the right of publicity, IP law has wide gaps in protection. Copyright protects original creative works such as a video, a song, or a script. But a person’s identity itself is not copyrightable subject matter because copyright governs new expressions that are considered “works of authorship” fixed in some physical context.
Your face, voice, mannerism, and the combination of traits that make you recognizable do not qualify as works of authorship under copyright law. A digital twin copies those traits and generates new content from who you are, rather than reproducing anything human-made. You are not a copyrighted work, so it follows naturally that no copyrighted work is being copied.
However, copyright is not entirely absent from the picture. Building a digital twin requires copying a person’s existing videos, recordings, or photos. Whether using copyrighted works to train AI constitutes copyright infringement or exempt from liability under the doctrine of “fair use” is one of the hottest questions in IP law right now.
Trademarks do not work either, though for different reasons. Trademarks protect distinctive marks—such as logos, names, and slogans—that consumers associate with goods or services. They prevent competitors from using confusingly similar marks in a way that interferes with the mark’s source-identifying function, rather than protecting the individual behind the mark. They were never designed to protect the way you tilt your head, the rhythm of your speech, or the expression you make when something surprises you.
For trademark law to apply at all, the use of a digital twin would need to function as a source identifier for goods or services. But while digital twins are being used commercially, they are not being used to identify a commercial source—they are being used as the person. Replicating someone’s identity at that level of depth is not what trademark law covers.
This Isn’t a Celebrity Only Problem
It’s easy to look at a nearly billion-dollar deal and assume this only matters to people with 160 million followers. That assumption is wrong. The same AI tools that can generate a digital twin of Khaby Lame can generate one of anyone. Your face, your voice, your mannerisms, can all be modeled, replicated, and monetized by someone who never asked for your consent.
The more visible a person’s identity is online, the more exposed they are to this kind of exploitation. And, this will increasingly apply to all of us given how many of us have already posted years of photos and videos to social media platforms (s.a., to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok). The law is not keeping up with the capabilities of technology. The gap is just increasing as the tools become more capable and more accessible.
Will the Law Keep Up?
It’s unclear. That uncertainty should make everyone a little uncomfortable. The legislative momentum is real as more states are paying attention. The ELVIS Act (in Tennessee) showed that targeted legislation is possible when the political will exists. But technology, including AI development, moves considerably faster than legislative cycles.
The Lame deal tells us clearly where commercial incentives are headed. The value in an AI powered human replica is enormous—Rich Sparkle alone is projecting more than $4 billion in annual sales from a single influencer’s likeness. That value doesn’t disappear just because consent is absent. When the unauthorized version of that deal starts happening at scale, the right of publicity will be the only real line of legal defense, and in too many jurisdictions, it barely exists.
Georgette Helo
Assistant Blogger
Loyola University Chicago School of Law, J.D. 2027