Beyond Celebrities: Can Ordinary Citizens Claim Personality Rights?

This issue ensures that identity misuse no longer needs a Hollywood actor or a cricket star to have their likeness stolen, manipulated and commercialised; ordinary individuals are at similar risk. This problem is fundamental to personality rights, which are generally defined as a person's right to regulate how their name, face, voice, signature, likeness, mannerisms, and digital avatars are used for commercial and public purposes. Though the “right to be let alone” was established by Warren and Brandeis, viewing identity protection as a luxury reserved for celebrities. The identity of a common citizen is now as susceptible to abuse, demonstrating that identity protection is an issue of basic human dignity rather than celebrity.

Historically, personality rights were viewed primarily as “celebrity rights” because famous individuals possessed commercial value and public recognition. However, with AI-generated content and instant internet fame blurring the line between public and private individuals, an important question arises: whether personality rights remain limited to celebrities, or extend to all individuals based on dignity, privacy, and consent?

Defining personality rights

At its core, a personality right is the right to control how your identity is used by others, especially commercially. This not only includes your name, face and voice but also extends to your signature, traits, digital likeness, and even recognisable mannerisms. The right to privacy is the older one, which includes the right to be left alone, to keep your personal life out of the public sphere. The right to publicity is more commercial, as it includes the right to control and benefit from the use of your identity. Think of the difference between a stranger photographing you at the market versus the photograph of you appearing in an advertisement without your permission.

For decades, these rights were treated as an almost exclusively celebrity concern. The reasoning made intuitive sense: celebrities have recognisable faces, marketable names and real economic value attached to their identities. Ordinary individuals, the argument went, simply do not have the kind of commercial goodwill that warranted legal protection.

The Celebrity-Centric Origins and their Limits

Indian courts developed personality rights jurisprudence primarily around fame and commercial value. In D.M. Entertainment v. Baby Gift House, the Delhi High Court recognised that the unauthorised commercial exploitation of Daler Mehndi's likeness constituted an actionable wrong. In the Titan Industries case, the court granted relief against false endorsement, establishing that using a celebrity's image in advertising without consent causes real legal harm.

More recently, Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India was a watershed moment. The Delhi High Court granted protection to the actor against AI-generated misuse of his name, image, voice and even his catchphrase without his consent. The courts' language was telling: it spoke of identity as something that belongs to the person, not merely as an economic asset to be protected only when financially significant. Here lies the critical transition. The same technology that threatens Anil Kapoor's identity threatens yours. The deepfake algorithms do not check your follower count before they clone your face.

The Accidental Celebrity and the MEME Economy

Social media has made virality accidental you do not need to be a public figure to become recognisable. You merely need to be in the right or wrong place at the right moment. A man's impassioned interview clip becomes a meme template. A woman's candid wedding moment becomes a reaction GIF used by brands in paid promotions. An elderly gentleman's innocent photograph becomes a product endorsement he never gave. The internet's attention economy is built, in no small part, on the uncompensated use of real people's real likenesses.

What makes this more than a mere irritant is when commercial gain enters the picture. Brands have been known to co-opt viral content for marketing campaigns with a cheeky nod to internet culture without ever approaching the actual person involved. The individual whose face generated the engagement gets no credit, no compensation, no control. The law has been almost absent from this conversation, and ordinary individuals rarely pursue relief because they do not know they can, and even if they do, the cost of litigation dwarfs any realistic remedy.

The AI Revolution and the Democratisation of Identity Theft

The most alarming development in this landscape is not virality it is the exponential ease of identity replication through generative AI. Until recently, creating a convincing fake video of someone required expensive equipment and skilled professionals. Today, it requires a few photographs and a free application.

Deepfake pornography, almost always targeting women, has destroyed reputations and caused severe psychological harm. Voice cloning has been used to impersonate distressed family members in scam calls. Fake professional profiles using stolen faces have facilitated fraud. The harm from identity replication is not a function of fame. It is a function of how convincingly the fake resembles the real one.

There is a major flaw in the current legal system. If artificial intelligence can perfectly replicate the appearance and voice of a school teacher, should the law really protect her any differently than it protects a film star? A doctor who is cloned to spread wrong medical advice suffers profound personal harm. A woman whose face is placed in explicit content suffers profound personal harm. Neither harm is any less severe because the victim is not recognisable on a billboard.

Constitutional Foundations and Free Speech Balance

The Constitutional foundations for extending personality rights to every individual are, at its core, straightforward: the Constitution of India does not distinguish the celebrated and the ordinary. The rights it guarantees are conferred upon such persons as such, not upon those who have attained public prominence.

In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, the Apex Court unanimously held that the right to privacy is a fundamental right protected under Article 21 of the Constitution. The Court's reasoning extended well beyond freedom from physical intrusion. It recognised informational self-determination as an integral dimension of privacy, affirming that every individual, regardless of their public standing, holds a constitutionally protected interest in controlling how information about themselves is used, disseminated and commercially exploited.

If the State is constitutionally prohibited from arbitrarily intruding upon the privacy of any citizen, there is no principled basis upon which a private actor, whether a corporation, a technology, a developer, or an anonymous individual, should be at liberty to replicate and commercially exploit that citizen's identity without legal consequences. The constitutional values at stake, namely dignity, autonomy, and the right to control one's own identity, do not diminish by virtue of the victim's autonomy.

Any serious framework for personality rights must also grapple honestly with the right to free expression. Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution protects satire, parody, criticism and commentary on public figures, and it does so for good reason. Political cartoons, memes and unflattering portrayals of those in power are not mere indulgences; they are instruments of democratic accountability.

The Case for Reform

If you ask a lawyer what protects you when someone steals your face for an advertisement, you will get a long, uncomfortable pause followed by a list of laws that were never really meant to answer that question. The IT Act, Defamation law, passing off, Copyright Act, Constitutional privacy. Each of these offers something, but none of them was built with digital identity theft in mind, and when you put them all together, the gaps are wide enough to drive a truck through.

What India actually needs is a change in thinking, not just a change in rules. Every Citizen's identity deserves legal protection, not just the ones with verified social media accounts and PR Teams. Concretely, that means a proper statute codifying personality rights for all individuals, not just those who can afford to establish their "commercial value" before a court. It means dedicated deepfake legislation with real teeth, not guidelines and advisories that platforms can quietly ignore. It means flipping the consent question entirely: if you want to use someone's identity for commercial purposes, the burden should be on you to get permission.

From being restricted to safeguarding economic interests and prominent figures' personality rights has expanded to include digital identity and human dignity. The rise of deepfakes, artificial intelligence, identity theft, digital manipulation, unlawful commercialisation, and AI impersonation in identity is a crucial component of individual liberty and dignity rather than a question of celebrity. Therefore, in the digital era, personality rights should evolve into more comprehensive legal safeguards accessible to all people, not just superstars. The principles relating to the lawful processing of personal data.