In September 2024, an IBC Accelerator project proposed and led by HAND showed — end to end, in a working pipeline — how a human likeness can be created with consent, identified at birth, signed into the content it appears in, and verified where audiences meet it. Two years later, the rules have caught up with the workflow. Most people still haven’t seen it.
The IBC Accelerator challenge Digital Replicas & Talent ID: Provenance, Verification and New Automated Workflows took on a question every studio, broadcaster, and guild now faces: when a performer’s likeness can be generated by machine, how do you tell an authorized likeness from an unauthorized one — automatically, across every platform it travels to? HAND first proposed the challenge in November 2023 and pitched it at the IBC Accelerator Kickstart Day in London in March 2024. The answer it tested was a standardized, resolvable identity framework for real people, their licensed likenesses, and fictional characters, carried inside the media itself.
“To have a digital replica made of myself, which I own, is amazing. I’m a performer and I’m an artist, and we’re putting our likeness out there. Somebody is making it work for us — but it’s still our image at the end of the day.”
This is not a mock-up. These three records sit in the HAND registry today. The likeness points to the human it is licensed from, and to the company that produced it. Click any node to open the live record.
10.23/E46E-7EB9-3AF8-E551-23D4 ↗
10.23/59BB-1EA7-1BAB-413B-37DC ↗
10.23/F90B-E2F3-AF95-276A-A2D7 ↗
The project framed every use of a performer’s name, image, likeness, and voice around four principles — first said publicly by Alexandra Shannon of CAA at HAND’s own “Battling Deepfakes” webinar, co-hosted with CDSA, on February 7, 2024. Their order matters: control exercised only after distribution and payment is remediation, not control.
In 2024 this was a proof of concept. In 2026 it is what contracts and statutes — in California, the EU, and beyond — assume exists. (The law calls these “digital replicas.” HAND’s canonical term is Licensed Human Likeness — and HAND holds that every synthetic likeness of a person deserves consent-based protection, whatever its statutory label.)
HAND proposed this project and assembled the collaborator team in cooperation with IBC. Organizations are named as credited at the time. With thanks to Evan Shafran.
If your organization creates, licenses, distributes, or pays for human likenesses — studios, broadcasters, agencies, guilds, leagues, platforms — HAND wants to talk to you. Talent: ask your representative about HAND.