Eduardas Vaitkus, former presidential candidate and leader of the Lithuanian People’s Party which ran for parliament earlier this month, has been fined for copyright infringement after posting an altered clip from an LRT election debate.
The 20-minute clip was taken from a debate show aired on September 24, in which Vaitkus participated. The synthetic version posted by the politician on YouTube was dubbed in Russian using deepfake technology: the AI-generated voices were made to sound like the real voices of the host and participants, while their lip movements were seamlessly modified to match the Russian sound.
LRT, which produced and aired the debate, filed a complaint with the Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission (LRTK) over copyright infringement as well as violations of the election laws.
The video was not marked as altered or synthetic, which is misleading to the viewers, LRT argued. Moreover, the Russian translation did not always match the Lithuanian original.
LRT also noted that Vaitkus’ opponents in the video were sometimes silenced altogether and some statements were taken out of context.
The LRTK found that Vaitkus had infringed copyright by distributing LRT content on his YouTube channel without permission.
LRT also turned to YouTube, asking to remove the video because, besides copyright, it violated the platform’s rules about marking AI-generated content. The video was removed from YouTube on September 30.
Vaitkus and the Lithuanian People’s Party he leads campaigned on a platform criticising the current government’s policies towards Russia, advocating for repairing relations with Moscow and lifting economic sanctions.
The party received 2.64 percent of the vote in the first round of the elections on October 13 and did not win any seats.
Vaitkus also ran in the presidential election last May where he finished fifth with 7.3 percent of the vote.
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