Virtual identity porn

Eugene Volokh raises an interesting question (here and here) about privacy. He says:

Within about ten years, there will probably be software that can merge people's photographs and voices with movies that depict someone else. This is of course often already done manually with photographs; but a sophisticated computer program can do it automatically and seamlessly, for a whole movie. And it can deal with multiple scenes where the person is shown from different angles doing different things. ... [T]he most common use of this would probably be for pornography. Consumers would buy the program; get ordinary, nonpornographic photographs of celebrities or of acquaintances; merge the photograph with a pornographic movie; and then be able to watch pornography that "stars" whomever it is they lust after. Some such merged movies might be sold to others, but many will be just made at home, to fit the user's own personal preferences. ... [I]f I were the sort of person whom either acquaintances or strangers would like to merge into a porn movie -- even one they'd only watch by themselves -- I wouldn't be at all pleased by this technology. Even if they watch the movie in the privacy of their own homes, there'd still be something mighty icky about them watching pictures that show me having sex. Again, I'm not sure whether it's worth trying to regulate this, or whether it's in any event practically possible to do so. But it's a troubling scenario, it seems to me.

I share Eugene's instinctual distaste at being the object of such a possible movie, and I think his empirical prediction is surely correct: this technology *will* be available, and soon. And yeah, a lot of celebrities will understandably be upset. But the appropriate advice for them: get over it. Volokh says "I'm not sure whether it's worth trying to regulate this", but it seems to me that it's obviously not. What principled lines could be drawn? What non-principled, arbitrary lines in roughly the right place could be drawn? As things stand now, we could have lookalikes act in pornographic films. A studio could hire an actor who looks a lot like President Bush and film him performing sexual acts with, I don't know, kangaroos or Tony Blair or whatever. There is, I contend, no moral difference between this and an actor digitally modified to look like George Bush. Nor should there, or practically could there, be a legal one. We'll get used to it.