The Delhi High Court's pending examination in Personality Rights cases raises a question larger than celebrity protection: how should Indian law distinguish identity from expression?

A celebrity's face on a product is an easy case. A cloned voice used to solicit money is another. The harder cases are the ones that look ordinary on the internet: a parody video, a meme built from an interview, a news report carrying a photograph, a commentary channel using a public figure's name, or a creator earning advertising revenue from a humorous impersonation. The Delhi High Court's continuing consideration of Vivek Anand Oberoi v. Collector Bazar & Ors. is significant because the Court is confronting precisely this boundary rather than treating every unauthorised use of a public persona as the same legal wrong.

The proceedings arise in a wider batch of personality-rights disputes involving celebrities, public figures, social-media material, artificial intelligence and alleged commercial exploitation. The hearing record shows the Court considering not merely whether an individual can protect his or her name, image or voice, but what legal interest is actually being protected in a particular case. The Court has also tested whether a person must be a celebrity before a personality-related claim can exist, whether false news can itself amount to an intellectual-property violation, and whether a claim based on personality can be used to restrain reporting or criticism. These are questions with consequences far beyond the parties before the Court.

The importance of the dispute is therefore not that Indian law has suddenly discovered personality rights. Delhi High Court decisions have already recognised enforceable interests in the commercial use of celebrity identity. In Titan Industries Ltd. v. Ramkumar Jewellers, the Court dealt with unauthorised use of Amitabh Bachchan and Jaya Bachchan in advertising and described publicity as the right to control the commercial use of human identity. In D.M. Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. v. Baby Gift House, the Court restrained the commercial exploitation of Daler Mehndi's persona through dolls and stressed identifiability and appropriation of essential attributes. At the same time, D.M. Entertainment warned that excessive emphasis on publicity rights could chill free speech.

The harder constitutional problem begins when the defendant is not simply selling a product with a celebrity's face on it. Consider a creator who edits an actor's interview into a parody and earns advertising revenue. Or a journalist who publishes a true report about the actor and uses the actor's photograph. Or a commentator who criticises the actor and identifies the subject by name. Or a meme-maker who exaggerates a public image that the celebrity has already cultivated. Each use may have an economic consequence. Yet it does not follow that each use appropriates the economic value of the persona in the legal sense.

This is where the language of “personality rights” can become dangerously broad. Privacy, reputation and publicity are related but distinct interests. Privacy protects a sphere of personal autonomy and private life. Defamation addresses injury caused by actionable statements concerning reputation. Publicity rights, where recognised, protect an economic interest in the commercial exploitation of identity. Passing off may address false association or endorsement. Copyright protects an original work of expression. These causes of action can arise from the same set of facts, but they do not have identical ingredients or defences.

The Supreme Court's decision in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu provides an important constitutional discipline. The judgment recognised privacy as part of Article 21, while also dealing with the competing protection of press freedom. It distinguished matters of private life from information contained in public records and considered the special position of public officials in relation to their official conduct. The principle matters here because the existence of a public persona cannot mean that every use of that persona becomes private information, just as public visibility cannot mean that every aspect of a person's private life becomes open to publication.

The same distinction should inform publicity claims. Titan Industries is particularly useful for identifying the commercial core of a publicity dispute. There, the celebrity images were used in an advertising campaign in a way that conveyed endorsement of another jeweller's goods. D.M. Entertainment similarly concerned dolls deliberately designed to trade on the recognisable identity of a performer. Those facts are materially different from a report about the celebrity or a parody of the celebrity. The commercial appropriation is not incidental in the former cases; it is the mechanism through which the defendant obtains the benefit.

That does not mean commerciality is irrelevant in expressive cases. The modern internet makes the categories overlap. A YouTube channel can be an expressive enterprise and a business at the same time. A digital newspaper earns advertising revenue. A creator can produce political satire while monetising the account on which it appears. The hearing record reflects precisely this difficulty: the Court considered whether a video that uses a celebrity's public image for parody can be treated as an unlawful commercial use merely because the platform and creator may earn revenue from views.

The answer should not be that monetisation automatically defeats free speech. Article 19(1)(a) protects expression, and the Supreme Court has recognised commercial speech as constitutionally protected in Tata Press Ltd. v. MTNL. That protection does not make every advertisement immune from regulation, but it does make it difficult to say that the moment expression has an economic component it falls outside constitutional scrutiny. A personality-rights injunction that restrains speech therefore requires more than the observation that somebody is making money from it.

The Court's own hypotheticals reveal why falsity cannot be the sole dividing line. A false statement about a person may be defamatory without being a publicity-rights violation. Conversely, a true photograph can become problematic if it is used to imply an endorsement that never existed. The hearing considered a hypothetical in which a celebrity genuinely appeared at an event and a news report accurately stated that fact. The difficult question was whether the report was merely using the celebrity's identity to tell the news or was commercially exploiting the celebrity's publicity value. That is a question of function and context, not truth alone.

The distinction is especially important for news media. The public cannot be expected to discuss a public event involving a public figure without naming the figure. A rule under which every use of a photograph or name requires prior consent would effectively give individuals a veto over reporting about themselves. That would sit uneasily with Article 19(1)(a). At the same time, calling material “news” cannot immunise fabricated endorsements, impersonation or a deliberately misleading commercial association. The legal test must therefore distinguish reference from appropriation and reporting from endorsement.

The hearing also raises the problem of celebrity status itself. Who is a celebrity? A film actor, a politician, a local elected representative, an influencer and a person who suddenly becomes famous after an event may all have substantial public recognition, but their interests are not identical. The Court has tested examples of a locally famous sarpanch, a public official, a politician who is also a celebrity and even a person who becomes famous without ever commercialising his or her identity. A legal right should not depend on a vague popularity contest.

A better approach is to treat celebrity as evidence of commercial value rather than as the source of the right itself. Everyone has an identity, privacy and reputation. What distinguishes a publicity claim is the existence of a protectable interest in the commercial value of that identity and its unauthorised appropriation. This makes the law more coherent. It protects an ordinary person against misuse of private information or false representation through the appropriate legal route, while reserving publicity doctrine for cases in which the defendant is actually trading on identity or an identifiable persona.

This distinction also matters for AI. Synthetic voice, image and video tools can produce impersonations that were previously expensive or technically difficult. A cloned voice used to solicit money or a fabricated endorsement can cause immediate and serious harm. The Delhi High Court's recent personality-rights jurisprudence has responded to this technological reality by recognising protection for identifiable attributes such as name, image, likeness, voice, manner of speaking and other distinctive characteristics. The concern is legitimate. But the solution should be precise enough to prevent fraud without making every AI-generated reference to a public figure legally suspect.

The remedy is as important as the right. A narrow injunction against a specified fake advertisement is relatively easy to administer. A dynamic injunction covering future URLs is different. The hearing record records an intermediary's concern about having to deal with approximately 26,000 URLs and about the absence of objectively discernible standards for deciding whether new material falls within an order. That concern should not be dismissed as a platform's administrative inconvenience. If an intermediary must decide whether a piece of content is parody, criticism, news or unlawful appropriation, the intermediary is effectively being asked to perform a legal and constitutional assessment that the court itself must first articulate.

Dynamic injunctions can therefore create a second-order speech problem. The original defendant may have had an opportunity to contest the injunction. A later speaker may not. If a platform removes material merely because it resembles the prohibited content, lawful commentary may disappear without any judicial determination. The greater the ambiguity in the order, the greater the incentive for platforms to over-remove. A remedy designed to protect personality can consequently become a mechanism for suppressing legitimate discussion about the personality.

The Court should therefore consider a structured test before extending an injunction beyond specifically adjudicated material. First, identify the attribute allegedly appropriated: name, image, voice, likeness, signature style or another distinctive feature. Second, identify the interest threatened: privacy, reputation, endorsement, commercial publicity or another recognised cause of action. Third, identify the function of the use: selling, endorsement, impersonation, reporting, criticism, parody, artistic expression or simple identification. Fourth, ask whether the order can be stated with sufficient precision that an intermediary can apply it without deciding disputed questions of law for every new URL.

The test should also distinguish direct appropriation from incidental use. Putting a celebrity's face on a bottle of cola to sell the product is direct appropriation. A fake video in which the celebrity appears to endorse the product is also direct and misleading. A news article reporting that the celebrity appeared in a cola advertisement is different. A parody that deliberately imitates the celebrity to comment on the celebrity is different again. The law should not flatten these uses merely because the same photograph, name or voice appears in all four.

The same caution applies to family members and non-celebrities. The hearing record shows the Court questioning whether the personality rights of a well-known family member can automatically extend to relatives who have not acquired the same public recognition. This is a critical issue. Reputation within a family is not automatically a transferable property right. Nor should the fame of one individual make every relative's identity commercially proprietary. Where a relative's own privacy or dignity is harmed, the law already has tools that can be considered. Expanding publicity rights by association risks creating a right with no clear limiting principle.

There is also a danger in allowing the label “tarnishment” to do too much work. Genuine commercial misuse can damage the economic value of an identity, and deliberately offensive synthetic material can cause serious dignitary harm. But criticism can also be unpleasant, mocking or deeply unflattering. If tarnishment is understood simply as making a celebrity look bad, it could swallow parody and criticism. A court must therefore ask whether the defendant is exploiting the persona commercially, falsely implying endorsement, invading a protected private sphere, or making a form of expression that remains within the constitutional protection of speech.

The public-interest dimension of the pending proceedings is consequently substantial. India does not yet have a comprehensive statute that sets out one unified code for personality and publicity rights. Much of the doctrine has developed through common law, passing off, privacy and case-specific injunctions. That makes judicial precision especially important. When courts create remedies in an emerging field, the immediate dispute may be small, but the formulation can govern thousands of future cases involving journalists, creators, platforms, advertisers and ordinary users.

The objective should not be to choose between celebrities and free speech. Both interests are legitimate. A person should be able to stop another from pretending to be them, selling a product through their identity, or using synthetic media to create a false commercial association. But the same person should not acquire a general right to control every reference, criticism, joke or report involving them. Fame may increase the commercial value of identity; it should not reduce the constitutional value of speech.

The significance of Vivek Anand Oberoi v. Collector Bazar & Ors. therefore lies in the opportunity to draw that line carefully. The question before the Court is not simply whether personality rights exist. It is whether Indian law can define what they protect, what they do not protect, and how an injunction can be framed without transferring the court's speech-balancing function to private intermediaries. If the eventual framework keeps the commercial right narrow, the privacy right distinct and the protection for expression real, it can strengthen personality-rights jurisprudence without turning identity into a private censorship power.

That would also make the doctrine more future-proof. Technology will continue to make identity easier to reproduce, but it will also make commentary, satire and creative transformation easier to produce. The law should therefore regulate the wrong, not the technology alone. The strongest principle emerging from the present proceedings is that the same name, face or voice can perform different legal functions in different contexts. The task of personality-rights law is to identify the function that makes the use wrongful, rather than treating the existence of the identity itself as the wrong.

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