Author: Tanishka Chaudhary, 4th year BBA LLB, National Forensic Science University, Delhi

I. Introduction

In less than three years, the personality rights, which is another peripheral common law curiosity, have become one of the most litigated areas of IP practice in India. In Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India & Ors., CS(COMM) 652/2023, which restrained the use of the actor’s name, voice, image and even catchphrase “Jhakaas”, for unauthorised commercial use, Justice Prathiba M. Singh noted that “technological tools… make it possible for any illegal user to use, produce or imitate any celebrity’s persona, by using any tools including Artificial Intelligence.” From 2025 to early 2026, ex parte injunctions have been issued in connection with allegations of AI-generated deepfakes, face-morphed pornographic content, unauthorised merchandise, and impersonating chatbots to Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Shatrughan Sinha, Vivek Oberoi, Jubin Nautiyal, Janhvi Kapoor and Khushi Kapoor. A structural issue is the lack of an independent law governing personality rights in India; neither the extent nor the duration of personality rights, nor their descendibility nor the remedies for their violation are expressly stated. Rather, courts have improvised a doctrine, which is a mixture of the right to privacy as enshrined in Article 21 of the Constitution of India, free speech jurisprudence under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India, the concept of passing off, trademark law’s protection of distinctive marks under the Trade Marks Act, 1999 and the moral rights sections of Sections 38, 38A and 38B of the Copyright Act, 1957. The results of this patchwork are real costs: each celebrity is required to obtain an ad interim, usually ex parte, injunction of their own; each order is a case-specific ruling, and the precedential value of the orders on the key issues of whether there are personality rights after death, whether personality rights can be licensed or assigned, and whether the balance between personality rights and Art. 19(1)(a) protection for satire, parody and journalistic commentary is likely to be minimal. So, the question the article answers is not how to protect personality rights in the first place given the volume of litigation that emerged in the last month, it’s clear that this is already happening but whether it is possible to continue to rely on ad hoc protection of the right under the tort of ‘passing off’ and constitutional doctrine of privacy in a right that is now central in thousands of public figures’ commercial life in the age of generative artificial intelligence, or whether there is a need for India to have a codified personality rights statute similar to the US right of publicity regimes. The development of the personality rights doctrine in India from ICC Development (International) Ltd. v. Arvee Enterprises to Titan Industries and Anil Kapoor, and on to the current massive wave of deepfake litigation, such as the proposed litigation in 2025-26, is then traced and the specific inadequacies identified in relying on injunctive relief are examined. Codification of the personality rights doctrine is then recommended, not just for the quality of the discourse to be strengthened, but also for the necessity of regulating the scale at which generative AI now threatens the individual’s personality.

II. The Doctrinal Foundation: From Privacy to Publicity

The Delhi High Court in ICC Development (International) Ltd. v. Arvee Enterprises & Anr. (2003 (26) PTC 245) was the first court in India to consider that the right of publicity was a form of the right to privacy, as opposed to being arising from any independent act of legislation. The Court held that “the publicity right vests in an individual and he alone is entitled to profit from it” and concluded that an event itself as a sporting event cannot have publicity rights. The court’s reasoning is doctrinally seminal, as it identified the right to privacy as the basis on which the right of publicity is founded. This reasoning was followed almost a decade later by the Delhi High Court in Titan Industries Ltd. v. M/s Ramkumar Jewellers, 2012 SCC OnLINE Del 2382 which granted an injunction to Amitabh and Jaya Bachchan, for stopping a competitor from using the same advertisement hoarding, holding that if the identity of a celebrity is established, the same would generate liability for the competitor, even in the absence of any independent evidence of confusion or deception. The Court later enunciated the three-part test used in later litigation: validity (plaintiff must have an enforceable right to her identity), identifiability (celebrity must be identifiable from the defendant’s unauthorised use) and the presumption of no need to prove that the defendant’s use is false or confusing once identifiability is proven. These two judgments didn’t merge the two rights into a single über-statutory personality right, but rather held them in two distinct legal vessels – publicity rights based on the right to privacy and passing off rights based on trademarks – which would prove significant as the level of infringement and technology increased.

III. The expansion of AI and the Anil Kapoor Watershed.

The 2023 order of Justice Anil Kapoor marks the doctrinal watershed and the first occasion where Indian courts have explicitly identified generative AI as a qualitatively different form of misuse of the trade secrets of personality rights, as opposed to a mere passing off of conventional methods. In Justice Prathiba M. Singh’s order, defendants were prohibited from using ‘Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, deep fakes, face morphing, GIFs’ to exploit Kapoor’s name, likeness, voice or persona, and even to his very catchphrase ‘Jhakaas’ as the ‘way in which he delivers the said word’ is ‘exclusively synonymous with the Plaintiff’s energetic and enthusiastic persona’. The Court also highlighted the “dark side” of AI abuse, observing that Kapoor’s image had not only been “morphed” with other actresses in offensive and derogatory videos and images, but even with other third party actresses, thereby accepting the existence of “deep fake pornography” and its serious impact which required immediate judicial action. An ex parte ad interim “John Doe” or “Ashok Kumar” injunction that names identified defendants and directions to the domain registrars to also block websites of “unidentified future infringers” proved to be the blueprint for virtually every subsequent celebrity personality rights action. The usefulness of this template is clear, and the limitation is equally noticeable, as each celebrity had to file a separate case, state the same constitutional and common law arguments and secure an individual injunction, with no law defining the scope of the right being asserted or establishing a standing regulatory framework similar to that of a takedown regime in the Information Technology Act, with the result that the entire process had to be repeated over the next two years.

IV. The Litigation Wave 2025-26: The three forces of scale, diversity and doctrinal strain.

Since 2025 the volume of personality rights litigation has demonstrated the doctrine’s new centrality and incoherence faced with unabated pressure. In Aishwarya Rai Bachchan v. Ors., CS(COMM) 956/2025, the Delhi High Court dealt with a chatbot that allowed users to engage in “personalized conversations with innuendos not appropriate for the Plaintiff”, as well as YouTube channels that used AI-generated deepfakes of the actress and found that her “Personality Rights, which include the Plaintiff’s name, image, signature, voice, likeness and all other elements of the Plaintiff’s persona, have acquired a unique distinctiveness and have huge commercial value. The order passed by the Bombay High Court in February 2026 for Shatrughan Sinha was even more specific, granting protection to his “Khamosh”—the right to be extended to his signature catchphrase and grounded on the Trade Marks Act, 1999, as well as the Copyright Act, 1957, in relation to moral rights. In Vivek Anand Oberoi v. Collector Bazar, 2026 SCC OnLine Del 470, it was the Delhi High Court’s order in February 2026 that relied on the “copyright of the plaintiff over his own personality” as a basis for granting the plaintiff an injunction, a concept that does not fit neatly within the categories of the Copyright Act and which exemplifies the courts adding to existing statutory definitions to fit a right the legislature did not define. More recently, in August 2026, Justice Jyoti Singh’s order for Khushi Kapoor concerned a different kind of harm obscene, pornographic content, not just commercial merchandising in addition to issuing takedown orders through the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, he also left it open for a further hearing of the larger dispute over unauthorised “fan pages,” which are increasingly more akin to non-consensual intimate imagery regulation than to classical IP protection. The rest of the Oberoi case, in which the actor’s own withdrawal from the proceedings led the court to appoint an amicus curiae and to limit the injunction’s scope to the case at hand, also demonstrates the practical fragility of a regime consisting only of individually pending civil cases as opposed to a standing statute or regulation for ongoing enforcement without the plaintiff’s continued involvement.

V. This is the Structural Case for Codification.

The trend in this wave of litigation reveals at least four structural flaws in a common-law regime of injunctions that could be corrected by a statute. Firstly, the fact that there is no statutory right, means that in each case the courts have to determine the basis for relief from an inconsistent mix of Article 21 privacy law, Article 19(1)(a) free-speech balancing, passing-off under the Trade Marks Act, and moral rights under the Copyright Act, and orders vary in the legal characterisation of the right being protected: some are based on “copyright over one’s own personality”, some on trademark-style distinctiveness and some on constitutional privacy alone. Second, there is no clarity with the current regime on whether personality rights are inheritable or how long they should endure: none of the 2023-26 orders provide clarity on whether personality rights survive the rights-holder’s death, or for how long after, which is of significant commercial interest as the estates of deceased celebrities routinely license their personalities for endorsement and merchandising, and which these US right-of-publicity statutes address through explicit statutory duration of protection extending decades after the rights-holder’s death. Third, the injunction-only remedial framework (usually an ex parte ad interim order followed by a ‘John Doe’ procedure against future unidentified infringers) does not offer any framework for determining damages to be awarded to the plaintiff, nor does it equate with criminal or quasi-criminal penalties in the way that takedown obligations under the Information Technology Act for other forms of harmful content do for hosting platforms. Fourth, from an efficiency standpoint, the judge-made solution to the problem of nearly identical suits – each celebrity litigating essentially the same pattern of generative-AI misuse against a cross-sectional group of anonymous infringers, domain registrars and platforms – could be achieved by a statutory notice-and-takedown system similar to the “safe-harbour” and “takedown” regimes already in place under the Information Technology Act for other types of unlawful content, without requiring each one to begin fresh litigation for materially similar harm.

VI. Recommendations

Relevant to this doctrinal development, there are a number of recommendations, some of which are more immediately actionable than others, which are now urged. First, a separate Personality Rights Act (or perhaps a dedicated chapter in the Trade Marks Act 1999) must be passed by Parliament, which would define the protected attributes of persona as name, voice, image, likeness, signature and distinctive mannerisms including catchphrases (as recognised in Anil Kapoor), and extend the statutory term of protection beyond the rights-holder’s death for a period of time to address the question of the descendibility that was left unaddressed in the litigation between 2023 and 2026. Third, the statute should explicitly address liability for AI model developers and platforms that use their tools to create deepfakes and face-morphed content, beyond the traditional injunction holders, which have been websites and domain registrars, and as evidenced by the Aishwarya Rai Bachchan litigation, AI generative tools are now the right target, not only the content they generate. Third, and more easily accomplished than any legislative changes, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology should set up a dedicated notice-and-takedown system for personality rights violation of AI-generated content as was done in the Khushi Kapoor case, which would enable the affected parties to seek the removal of infringing deepfakes without initiating full court proceedings in all cases, and for damages and contested cases. Fourth, the judiciary, pending legislative changes, should uniform the template of the personality rights injunctions issued in the orders passed in 2023-26 by the Delhi, Bombay, and other High Courts, combining the dynamic injunction, John Doe mechanism, and platform-directed takedown aspects which have been issued in various forms across the orders, in order to ensure uniformity in the reliefs granted and the legal characterisations applied in materially similar factual situations. Last but not least, any codification exercise must explicitly include protections for satire, parody, biography and journalistic commentary under Article 19(1)(a); the existing ad hoc protections, especially against unidentified “John Doe” defendants and against broad categories of expression, risk stifling legitimate expression if a statutory right is drafted too broadly without a corresponding free-speech exception similar to the fair dealing exceptions already in place in the Copyright Act, 1957.

VII. Conclusion.

This illustrates that Indian courts have built a workable though structurally shaky doctrine of personality rights by piecemealing it together in the course of issuing injunctions in three distinct fields of law, none of which were intended for this use. This is an essential protective measure, but the current unchecked misuse of AI that is becoming evident – such as impersonating chatbots, face-morphed pornography, unauthorised merchandising and deepfake video – has outrun what can be managed sustainably by case-by-case, fact-specific ex parte injunctions, especially as the doctrine has been silent on matters such as descendibility, statutory damages and platform or AI-developer liability. While India does not have to change the injunctive relief model which has been protecting celebrities till now, the rampage of infringement in volume and technology in 2025-26 is clearly demanding a codified personality rights law, backed by a dedicated takedown administrative mechanism for AI-generated content, over and above the current patchwork of judicial improvisation.