In recent years, personality rights have moved from the periphery to the forefront of legal discourse in India. With the growing influence and utility of artificial intelligence, the proliferation of innumerable digital platforms, and the rise of generative AI, the unauthorised use of someone’s pictures, names, and likeness has intensified. This has prompted the courts to intervene more decisively when it comes to addressing the issue of hampered personality rights of various celebrities. A significant development in the jurisprudence of these rights emerged in the cases of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan v. Aishwaryaworld.com & Ors.,¹ Abhishek Bachchan v. The Bollywood Tee Shop,² and Karan Johar v. Ashok Kumar,³ wherein injunctions were granted against the defendants to protect the personas of these celebrities.

The plaintiffs approached the Delhi High Court when they discovered that their names, images, likenesses, and other attributes were being misused across various platforms. Some falsely represented themselves as their official portals, while others hosted downloadable content, such as wallpapers, featuring their images, including e-commerce platforms that were selling merchandise such as t-shirts and mugs with their pictures. Certain websites even used their names and photographs to suggest commercial partnerships and associations, largely misleading the public, and more disturbingly, AI-driven chatbots were impersonating them and engaging in sexually suggestive conversations with the users and deepfake videos featuring their faces in fabricated contexts. These misappropriations suggested a systematic, large-scale attempt to monetise their personas without consent, causing both financial and reputational harm to these celebrities.

The court concluded that such actions were clearly misleading and capable of deceiving the public into believing that these websites, merchandise, products, or content were officially endorsed or promoted by these celebrities. Underscoring the urgency of the matter and its potential to cause irreversible reputational harm, the court ordered an injunction against these platforms and restrained them from using any of their personal attributes for commercial gain. Interestingly, the injunction explicitly covered AI, generative AI, deepfakes, machine learning, and face morphing, marking a clear demarcation on the application of personality rights in a technologically evolving era.

However, the order has not been delivered in a vacuum; instead, over the last few years, the courts have steadily been paving the way for the emergence of a clear framework on personality rights. In Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India,⁴ the Delhi High Court has previously recognised the commercial value of celebrity personas and held that unauthorized use whether through merchandise or digital media is impermissible and amounts to a violation of personality rights. Further, in another case, Amitabh Bachchan v. Rajat Nagi,⁵ the Court granted relief to protect the actor’s images and his unique voice from commercial misuse. Once again in Jaikishan Kakubhai Saraf v. Peppy Store,⁶ the court extended personality right protection to the images, voice, name and even his signature phrase “Bhidu” against commercial exploitation. These cases have set the tone for personality litigation in India.

The latest orders involving Aishwarya, Abhishekh and Karan are progressive and merge the legal principles with the modern-day technological challenges, demonstrating the court’s willingness to protect a person’s likeness. By expressly including AI, deepfakes and machine learning, the court has boldly responded to the realities of how celebrity personas are misused in a digital landscape and how important it has become to bring these technological weapons within the ambit of existing laws to protect a person’s rights. For intermediaries and platforms engaged in unauthorised usage of celebrity personas, this judgment serves as a reminder of the serious legal consequences that can emerge from infringing upon someone’s persona. For celebrities and public figures, this is a reassuring as well as an instructive relief to assert their rights in online spaces and take control of their likeness and personas, especially since they are easily accessible.

By - Manasi Chaudhari