Personality rights in India have erupted from judicial whispers into mainstream headlines. What was once restricted to celebrities is now alarming for the masses in light of increasing proliferation of deepfakes. The intermediaries run to dodge accountability, while the ordinary person finds their face weaponised without consent. This highlights India's need to move beyond piecemeal judicial solutions and finally breakthrough with a cautiously calibrated hybrid mechanism that leverages existing frameworks while bridging critical gaps.
The Nexus: Why Personality Rights Matter Beyond Fame
The foundation of personality rights sits within Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, granting all persons the right to life and personal liberty. R.N. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu[1] is a leading case on the subject, wherein the Supreme Court of India recognised that the constitutional guarantee under Article 21 encompasses the “right to be left alone” and thereby protects individuals from unauthorised exploitation of their identity (commercial or otherwise). This sets the stage for personality rights in India establishing that such rights do not merely prevent confusion or protect brands, but ultimately work towards preserving human dignity and autonomy in the face of commercial predation.
The link between personality rights and privacy is inseparable from a larger threat of identity theft. When someone's voice is cloned through artificial intelligence, or their face superimposed onto illicit content, or when their name is used to deceive, two simultaneous violations occur: a privacy violation and an economic one.
The Digital Data Protection Act (hereinafter the “DPDP Act”) addressed unauthorised data processing, but it focuses narrowly on personal data collection and retention, not the creative synthesis of data into deepfakes or digital avatars. Meanwhile, the Information Technology Act's Sections 66C (identity theft), 66D (impersonation), and 66E (privacy violations) provide criminal remedies, yet these mechanisms operate reactively, prosecuting harm after it has occurred. A comprehensive personality rights mechanism must pre-empt such exploitation through consent-based requirements and robust injunctive relief.
The Bundle: What Exactly is Protected?
Personality rights constitute a sui generis intellectual property bundle that has no perfect analogue in existing Indian law. The scope has evolved dramatically through judicial interpretation. In D.M. Entertainment v. Baby Gift House[2], the Delhi High Court addressed the unauthorised use of singer Daler Mehndi's image and voice in dolls, recognising personality rights as encompassing a person's name, likeness, and identifiable characteristics. Two decades later, in Anil Kapoor v. Simply life India & Ors.[3], the Delhi High Court dramatically expanded this scope. The judgement protected not only the actor's face and voice but also his distinctive gestures, manner of speaking, and his catchphrase “jhakaas.” This expansion is critical: personality rights now protect the entire commercial gestalt of a person's identity, and not just discrete elements.
The bundle includes moral rights under the Copyright Act, 1957. Section 38A and 38B grant performers the right to attribution and protection against distortion of their performances. Section 57 protects the personal rights of authors, including their right to prevent mutilation or distortion of their work. However, copyright law is inadequate because it focuses on creative works, not on the persona itself. The Trademark Act, 1999 extends passing off remedies among others, but these require proof of consumer confusion, a threshold that misses many personality rights violations, remarkably those involving identity theft or misuse that is non-commercial. The existing legal framework therefore, divides personality rights across multiple statutes, each with distinct thresholds, scopes, and remedies.
The Judicial Trajectory: From Foundation to the AI Era
The journey of personality rights in Indian jurisprudence reveals an adaptive judiciary struggling with an inadequate statutory framework. The case of R.N. Rajagopal (1994) helped ground personality rights in constitutional privacy; D.M. Entertainment (2010) further brought commercial dimension of persona infringement into focus; and the celebrity case of Anil Kapoor (2023) allowed to expand the scope of such rights to cover the entire persona of a celebrity. By the year 2025, the caseload has accelerated drastically. Akshay Kumar, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Kuman Sanu, Hrithik Roshan, and Suniel Shetty have all sought judicial protection against AI-generated deepfakes, manufacture and sale of unauthorised merchandise, as well as impersonation over the internet. The courts have rigorously responded with expansive John Doe orders in the form of ex-parte injunctions against wrongdoers – including those whose identity remains unknown, to prevent ongoing and future violations.
This judicial activism, while commendable, exposes our system's vulnerability and fragility. Courts in India are issuing interim injunctions based on principles enshrined in constitutional privacy, crafting novel remedies on the fly, and applying trademark and copyright doctrines by analogy. Yet in the absence of a coherent statutory framework, these precedents deem inconsistent, remedies vary by jurisdiction even across states, and developing technologies like voice cloning and deepfake impersonation outpace judicial reasoning and action. The Punjab and Haryana High Court's decision in T-Series v. Dreamline Reality Movies, Mohali[4] even examined whether personality rights exist outside celebrity context, contradicting the expansive and inclusive adoption adopted by the Delhi High Court, a doctrinal crack that demands legislative clarification.
Intermediaries and the Safe Harbour Illusion
Section 79 of the Information Technology Act, 2000 provides safe harbour to intermediaries, digital platforms, social media networks, hosting services, if they act as neutral conduits and exercise due diligence. This provision was devised to foster growth in the digital economy by guarding platforms from liability for third-party content over which they assume no control. However, in light of personality rights, the safe harbour principle, in some way becomes a safe haven for infringement.
Under Section 79(2)(C), platforms must observe “due diligence” and comply with government guidelines to maintain immunity. Yet “actual knowledge” of unlawful content is the threshold, a standard that requires explicit notice and fails to capture systematic patterns of misuse. A platform might host thousands of deepfake videos of celebrities without technically “knowing” about each one until a complaint arrives. Moreover, the takedown system incentivises platforms to do the bare minimum: remove content upon notice but conduct no proactive screening. This passive stance is significantly at odds with the nature of personality rights violations, particularly those involving non-consensual personal images or AI generated deepfakes, that result in reputational harm during procedural or injunctive takedown.
The Data Protection Board of India, which is the enforcement authority for data breaches, creates a jurisdictional obstacle for victims of personality rights infringement. Under the present legal framework, the victims of deepfakes are required to prove 'unauthorized processing of data' which is a restrictive standard that fails to capture the very quintessence of personality rights. To address this issue, the Board's mandate must either be significantly expanded, or a dedicated enforcement body must be established to provide swift, identity specific relief thereby, filling the void in the current data protection laws.
What Mechanism Should Replace Fragmentation?
A bespoke and standalone statute catering to personality rights alone seems redundant and ultimately futile, given the pace at which technology evolves every day. Legislation written today risks becoming obsolete tomorrow, leaving the legislature perpetually a step behind technological innovation. What is demanded instead is a flexible approach capable of prioritizing adaptive compliance and can evolve alongside emerging technologies.
However, it is suggested that India adopt a three-tier mechanism.
First, to establish Constitutional clarity by codifying through legislation by amendments to relevant Acts or a narrowly focused rulebook, allowing personality rights to exist as a standalone category, protected under Article 21 and encompassing both privacy and publicity dimensions.
Second, to amend the DPDP Act or the IT Rules to mandate explicit, compulsory consent for processing a person's biometric, vocal, or visual likenesses for creating artificial media, with substantial civil and criminal consequences for non-compliance.
Third, to create an isolated Personality Rights Appellate Cell within the existing grievance redressal framework under relevant laws, with authority to issue takedown notices and provide effective interim relief, streamlined enough to resolve cases within a span of months instead of years, while remaining accountable to the appellate tribunal already envisioned in the latest digital governance structure.
This hybrid paradigm optimizes the existing institutional capacity and avoids legislative redundancy. It provides a 'fast-track' enforcement mechanism that integrates with current laws, ensuring that the legal system remains both procedurally robust and sensitive to the unique factual complexities of AI-driven infringements.
Charting a Path Forward: Law and Practice
The trajectory of personality rights in India from R.N. Rajagopal (1994) to the contemporary cases in 2025 involving Akshay Kumar, Hrithik Roshan, and Kumar Sanu reveals both the judiciary's adaptability and the legislature's inertia. Courts have grafted personality rights onto constitutional privacy, copyright performer rights, and trademark passing off, a patchwork that works for celebrity disputes but fails for emerging harms for the masses. The cases have also shifted from asking “is personality a right?” to “how can we remediate AI-driven violations quickly enough to prevent reputational collapse?”
Legislation, when it comes, must address several specificities. It must clarify that personality rights are not limited to celebrities but are available to any person whose identity has commercial or reputational value. It must establish that consent is the gateway requirement: suing a person's name, image, voice, likeness, or behavioural patterns for commercial or deceptive purposes without consent is a personality rights violation, regardless of whether it causes consumer confusion (a trademark law requirement) or whether it distorts an original work (which the copyright law requires). It must make intermediary platforms accountable not just for removing content upon notice but for implementing reasonable technological safeguards against deepfakes and synthetic media. And it must provide for expedited remedies, interim injunctions that can be granted within days, because reputational harm from deepfakes is instantaneous, while court proceedings are glacial.
The institutional mechanism, whether tribunal, appellate cell, or empowered board, matters less than the substantive clarity and procedural speed it provides. In the short term, India's courts will continue to fill the gap, issuing John Doe orders and expanding Article 21 doctrine. But this is unsustainable as litigation volume increases and technology proliferates. The personality rights “boom” that has erupted in India's courts is a symptom of unmet legal demand. Meeting that demand through a targeted, pragmatic reform, one that does not require decades of legislative debate but crystallises the courts' own jurisprudence into operational rules, is the more prudent path than either wholesale inaction or a comprehensive statutory overhaul.
Authors – Amit k. Panigrahi, Partner at Kochhar & Co
Sahil Arora, Principal Associate at Kochhar & Co
Ishikaa Seth, Associate at Kochhar & Co