In the quiet corridors of Copenhagen, a legislative shift is occurring which may well offer the antidote to the digital anarchy currently plaguing the social media landscape of Pakistan. As of early 2026, Denmark has pioneered a move to amend its Copyright Act, effectively categorising a citizen’s physical likeness; their face, body, voice, and unique persona, as personal intellectual property under new provisions in their legislative setup. By shifting the protection of human identity from the murky waters of privacy law into the robust and enforceable framework of copyright, Denmark has built a legal shield for the Artificial Intelligence era. For Pakistan, a nation grappling with an epidemic of unauthorised image sharing and malicious deepfakes, this model is no longer a foreign curiosity; it is a necessity.

Pakistan’s current primary defence against digital abuse is the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) 2016. While PECA criminalises the violation of modesty under Section 21 and the distribution of information that harms reputation under Section 18, it operates on a reactive criminal standard. To seek justice, a victim must navigate the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA), proving not only that their image was used without consent but that it was done with dishonest intention as defined in Section 2(p). The burden of proof is back breaking. In a society where a leaked photograph can lead to social ostracisation or honour based violence, waiting for a criminal investigation to conclude is a luxury many cannot afford. Furthermore, the Copyright Ordinance 1962 remains a colonial era relic. Under Section 2(d)(iv), the author of a photograph is defined as the person taking the photograph, not the subject. This leaves the human being in the picture legally hollow, while the person holding the camera, or the AI prompt, holds the rights.

The Danish approach flips this script. By granting individuals Identity Copyright, the law stops treating a deepfake as a mere privacy breach and starts treating it as theft. Under the Danish Copyright Act (as amended in 2026), the moment a person’s likeness is digitally replicated, the individual holds the original rights for life plus 50 years. This provides three immediate advantages that Pakistan desperately needs. First, it establishes consent over harm; one does not need to prove a deepfake is indecent or defamatory to trigger a takedown. Second, it creates platform accountability. Under the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which supports this Danish model, platforms are far more responsive to infringement notices than harassment complaints, forcing Big Tech to treat a citizen's face with the same urgency they treat a pirated film. Third, it offers post mortem sanctity. Unlike PECA, which focuses on living victims, the Danish model protects a likeness after death, a vital safeguard in a landscape where images of the deceased are often weaponised in political disinformation.

As generative AI becomes democratised, the pornification of the internet has become a weapon of choice for blackmailers. Scholarly research in the International Journal of Law Management & Humanities (Vol. 7, 2024) notes that deepfakes are increasingly used for virtual forgery, yet our laws remain ill equipped to handle synthetic media. The Danish model respects legitimate parody but sets a high realism threshold. If an AI generated image is realistic enough to be confused with the actual person, it is a property infringement. For a Pakistani woman whose face is superimposed onto explicit content, this offers a direct legal path to demand immediate erasure, bypassing the slow moving wheels of criminal litigation.

Critics may argue that copyrighting a human face commodifies our existence. However, in an age where AI models are trained on our data without consent, we are already being commodified. The question is who should hold the power: the algorithm or the individual? Pakistan should lead the South Asian discourse by amending the Copyright Ordinance 1962 to include Personality Rights. We must move beyond the view of copyright as a tool for authors and musicians and recognise it as the ultimate protector of the Digital Self. If we are to protect our citizens from the predatory reaches of AI, we must stop treating our identities as mere data points and start treating them as the sovereign property they truly are.

Ahsan A. MunirThe writer is a lawyer with an LL.B (Hons) from the University of London and an LL.M from the University of Dundee. He teaches law at Beaconhouse International College and the Lahore School of Economics. He can be reached at ahsanahmedmunir@hotmail.com

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