Authored By: Muskan Virendra
Lloyd Law College
ABSTRACT
The rapid proliferation of generative artificial intelligence technologies has exposed critical inadequacies in India’s existing legal framework governing personality and publicity rights. This paper critically examines the tripartite architecture of copyright, trademark, and the right of publicity as instruments of identity protection, analysing their interaction with constitutional guarantees under Article 21 of the Constitution of India. Through a systematic evaluation of landmark judicial pronouncements, including Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India (2023) and Sonakshi Sinha v. Character Technologies Inc. (2026), the paper identifies significant normative lacunae arising from the absence of dedicated artificial intelligence-specific legislation. Drawing upon comparative jurisprudence from the United States of America, it argues that India’s judicially improvised responses, while commendable as immediate remedial interventions, remain insufficient substitutes for comprehensive statutory reform. The paper concludes by proposing the enactment of a dedicated Personality Rights and Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, designed to ensure coherent, accessible, and prospective legal protection for all individuals in the age of generative artificial intelligence.
KEYWORDS
Right of Publicity, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Deepfakes, Article 21 of the Constitution of India, Copyright Law
INTRODUCTION
The Right of Publicity
The right of publicity, also known as personality rights, is a fundamental legal principle that grants individuals the power to control and profit from the use of their own name, likeness, or image. This right operates in two main ways: first, the right to privacy, which simply means the right to be left alone without unwanted interference; and second, the right to prevent others from using one’s image for commercial purposes without permission, which falls under a legal wrong called passing off (meaning someone falsely suggests a connection to another person in order to gain a benefit). While passing off addresses financial harm, the right to privacy extends further and protects a person even where no financial loss is involved.[1]
Historical Development
The concept underlying the right of publicity originally evolved from privacy law. It was first formally articulated by two American legal scholars, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, in a seminal article published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890, in which they defined it as simply the “right to be left alone.” Subsequently, legal scholar William Prosser categorised the right to privacy into four distinct categories, each addressing a different type of harm:
1.Protection against unwanted interference in a person’s private life;
2.Prevention of the public disclosure of private and embarrassing personal facts;
3.Protection against being portrayed in a misleading or false manner; and
4.The right to seek legal remedy when one’s name or image is used without consent, typically for commercial gain.[2]
Nature and Scope of Publicity Rights
Publicity rights are generally treated similarly to intellectual property rights that is, legal protections afforded to creations or attributes that belong to an individual. These rights are most commonly associated with celebrities and public figures who have established a recognised public identity. However, courts have frequently declined to extend this protection where a person’s life is considered newsworthy or already falls within the public domain, meaning it is freely accessible to the public and serves a broader social interest.[3]
BACKGROUND
The accelerated assimilation of artificial intelligence into socio-technical systems has fundamentally transformed the governance landscape, necessitating a comprehensive re-examination of prevailing legal and regulatory frameworks. India, distinguished by its vast population, rapidly expanding digital infrastructure, and the far-reaching ambitions of its Digital India initiative, constitutes one of the most consequential testing grounds for AI-driven solutions on a global scale. From predictive policing and algorithmic-based financing to facial recognition technologies and healthcare diagnostics, artificial intelligence is increasingly embedded within both public administration and the fabric of everyday life. This widespread proliferation, however, engenders pressing concerns pertaining to privacy, algorithmic bias, autonomous decision-making, accountability deficits, and governance opacity challenges for which existing legal frameworks were neither conceived nor equipped to address.[4]
India’s prevailing regulatory architecture, anchored by instruments such as the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, sector-specific regulations, and the Competition Act, 2002, provides only fragmented and implicit coverage of AI-related matters. While these frameworks address ancillary concerns, they fall critically short in managing AI-specific phenomena such as deepfake generation, the training of models on personal datasets, and the operation of decision-making systems devoid of meaningful human oversight. The landmark RAGHAV AI case vividly illustrates this regulatory vacuum: the initial recognition of copyright granted to an AI co-author was subsequently withdrawn owing to unresolved questions regarding legal standing, thereby exposing the inadequacy of static statutory law in addressing the demands of dynamic and rapidly evolving technological contexts.[5]
Statutory law, by its very nature, is inherently reactive rather than anticipatory. It furnishes structured frameworks for governing established conduct but is ill-suited to keep pace with the continuously evolving and self-adapting characteristics of AI algorithms. The interpretability challenges, embedded biases, and shifting decision boundaries intrinsic to AI systems render conventional legislative instruments insufficient for ensuring requisite levels of accountability and transparency. NITI Aayog’s Responsible AI framework and the principles articulated within the National Strategy for Artificial Intelligence reflect an evolving institutional awareness of these imperatives; nonetheless, the continued absence of comprehensive AI-specific legislation leaves considerable normative lacunae unaddressed.[6]
Against this backdrop, the present study positions itself within the tension between technological innovation and regulatory responsibility. It undertakes a critical examination of India’s existing statutory framework with a view to evaluating, adapting, and potentially reforming its provisions to ensure the meaningful governance of artificial intelligence, thus striking a judicious balance between the imperative of fostering innovation and the equally vital obligation of safeguarding societal, ethical, and economic interests.[7]
LEGAL ANALYSIS
The Intersection of Generative Artificial Intelligence, Personality Rights, and Constitutional Discourse: A Legal Analysis
The accelerating proliferation of generative artificial intelligence technologies has precipitated an unprecedented jurisprudential crisis at the nexus of identity, commerce, and constitutional liberty. The emergence of deepfakes, synthetic voice replication, and AI-generated likenesses has compelled legislators, courts, and legal scholars to revisit and substantially reconstruct the doctrinal architecture governing personality rights. This analysis examines the tripartite framework of copyright, trademark, and the right of publicity as instruments of legal protection, evaluates their interaction with First Amendment doctrine in the United States, and situates India’s statutory regime within this evolving discourse.[8]
II Distinguishing the Foundational Instruments: Copyright, Trademark, and the Right of Publicity
A rigorous legal analysis demands that these three protective mechanisms be clearly delineated, as their conceptual conflation has generated substantial doctrinal confusion.
Copyright protects original works of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression, as codified under 17 U.S.C. § 102(a). Crucially, copyright does not extend to a person’s physical identity, including their face, voice, or persona, but rather attaches to the expressive work in which such identity may be captured. Consequently, where a celebrity’s likeness appears in a commercial work, dual permissions may be required: one from the copyright proprietor of the underlying work and a separate authorisation from the individual whose identity has been appropriated.
Trademark, as governed by the Lanham Act, is a source-identifying mechanism designed primarily to protect consumers from confusion regarding the origin of goods and services. Certain attributes of a person’s persona may satisfy the conditions for trademark protection, most notably consistent commercial usage functioning as a source identifier. Trademark principles bear a conceptual kinship with publicity rights insofar as both doctrines are deployed to prevent unjust enrichment through the unauthorised exploitation of an individual’s or brand’s established goodwill and reputation.
The right of publicity, by contrast, occupies distinct and independent legal terrain. It is not contingent upon the creation of a copyrightable work or the registration of a commercial symbol. Rather, it represents what may be described as a natural disposition of justice, namely the inherent entitlement of every individual to determine whether, by whom, and under what conditions their identity shall be commercialised. Critically, a state-based right of publicity claim is generally not preempted by federal copyright regulations, as these constitute distinct causes of action vesting standing in different parties.[9]
III. The Indian Statutory Framework
In India, the legal architecture undergirding personality rights draws upon both copyright and trademark law, supplemented by developing judicial recognition of publicity rights. The Copyright Act grants authors exclusive rights over literary, artistic, musical, and dramatic works, with protection subsisting for the creator’s lifetime plus sixty years. For anonymous or pseudonymous works, protection endures for sixty years from the date of publication, while collaborative works enjoy protection for sixty years following the death of the last surviving author.
Beyond economic rights, Indian law recognises moral rights, including the right to claim authorship and the right to object to derogatory treatment of one’s work. Trademark law in India further safeguards commercial identity by conferring monopoly rights upon registered mark holders, while unregistered marks retain residual protection under the common law tort of passing off, the foundational principle being that no person may trade upon the reputation or name of another. Together, these instruments provide a composite, if imperfect, framework for the protection of personality in the digital age.[10]
The First Amendment Tension: Navigating Constitutional Complexity
Perhaps the most jurisprudentially contested dimension of the right of publicity lies in its collision with free expression guarantees. Courts tasked with reconciling personality rights with the First Amendment have, to date, produced what scholars have characterised as a notoriously disjointed patchwork of conflicting constitutional rules, a doctrinal maze that has yet to yield a coherent and universally applicable resolution.[11]
A principled resolution requires precise identification of the state interests that the right of publicity is engaged to protect. These interests may be classified into four discrete categories: first, the performance value of the plaintiff, being the economic product of their skill and labour; second, the monetary value of identity, referring to the commercial premium attached to a recognisable persona; third, dignitary interests, encompassing protection against humiliating or demeaning appropriation; and fourth, autonomous personality, representing the individual’s sovereign right to control their own narrative.[12]
These four interests must be weighed against three corresponding categories of speech: commercial communication, public discourse, and commodified expression, the last being a hybrid category encompassing merchandise, entertainment products, and AI-generated content that appropriates identity without purely commercial intent.
The analytical imperative, therefore, is not to apply a mechanical formula yielding predetermined constitutional outcomes, but rather to map the precise intersection of the relevant state interest against the applicable category of protected speech in each individual case. This framework enables courts to render constitutionally coherent determinations that are responsive to the specific factual matrix before them, and equips legislators with a principled basis upon which to craft targeted statutory interventions in an era increasingly defined by the capabilities and hazards of generative artificial intelligence.[13]
CASE LAW DISCUSSION
1. Sonakshi Sinha v. Character Technologies Inc. & Ors., CS(COMM) 275/2026 (High Court of Delhi).
The Delhi High Court’s landmark ruling in Sonakshi Sinha v. Character Technologies Inc. and Others (CS(COMM) 275/2026) represents a significant judicial intervention at the intersection of personality rights and generative artificial intelligence. Justice Jyoti Singh granted an ex parte ad interim injunction restraining the defendants from exploiting the plaintiff’s name, image, voice, and likeness through artificial intelligence tools, including deepfakes, generative artificial intelligence, and AI-enabled chatbots, without her consent or authorisation.
The Court drew upon its established precedents to fortify its reasoning. In Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India (2023 SCC Online Del 6914), it was held that a celebrity’s right of endorsement constitutes a substantive source of livelihood, which cannot be undermined through unauthorised commercial dissemination of their persona in merchandise or other commercial materials.
Furthermore, in Jaikishan Kakubhai Saraf v. Peppy Store and Others (2024 SCC OnLine Del 3664) and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan v. Aishwaryaworld.com and Others (2025 SCC OnLine Del 5943), the Court affirmed that unauthorised exploitation of a celebrity’s personal attributes causes not only commercial detriment but also constitutes a violation of the individual’s rights to privacy, personality, and dignified existence.
Taken together, these judicial pronouncements firmly establish that personality and publicity rights extend beyond conventional media into artificially generated environments, thereby obligating platforms hosting infringing content to ensure its removal and reflecting India’s progressively evolving jurisprudence on digital identity protection.[14]
2.Case Law: Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India & Ors. (2023)
Delhi High Court | CS(COMM) 652/2023 | Decided: September 20, 2023
This landmark Indian precedent directly addresses personality rights in the context of generative artificial intelligence, wherein the celebrated Bollywood actor instituted proceedings seeking injunctive relief against twenty-one defendants who had misappropriated his name, image, voice, likeness, and persona across various digital platforms without lawful authorization.
The defendants engaged in a broad spectrum of violations, including the creation of artificially generated deepfakes, face-morphing videos, GIF animations, unauthorised merchandise, and domain name squatting. Most egregiously, certain defendants deployed generative artificial intelligence tools to superimpose the plaintiff’s likeness upon pornographic content featuring other actresses, thereby constituting a severe instance of reputational tarnishment.
Justice Prathiba M. Singh granted an ex parte ad-interim injunction, holding that a celebrity’s name, voice, persona, and likeness collectively constitute protectable personality attributes under law. The learned Court observed that technological tools, particularly Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, have enabled the rampant misuse of celebrity identities, thereby warranting judicial intervention. Placing reliance upon the learned Supreme Court’s ruling in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu (1994) 6 SCC 632, the Court reaffirmed that the unauthorised commercial exploitation of an individual’s identity constitutes a violation of both personality rights and the constitutional guarantee of privacy enshrined under Article 21 of the Constitution of India.
The judgment is of considerable significance insofar as it recognises that dilution, tarnishment, and blurring occasioned through artificially generated content are actionable tortious wrongs, thereby establishing a critical judicial framework for the protection of the right of publicity against the misuse of generative artificial intelligence in India.[15]
CRITICAL ANALYSIS
Here is the rephrased version in formal academic language, with informal symbols removed and grammatical refinements applied:
Gaps, Judicial Trends, and Policy Implications in India’s Personality Rights Jurisprudence under AI Governance
- Normative and Legislative Gaps
The most significant deficit in India’s existing legal architecture is the absence of a dedicated statutory instrument governing artificial intelligence and personality rights. The Information Technology Act, 2000 and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, while substantive in addressing data governance and cyber offences broadly, remain structurally ill-equipped to confront AI-specific harms such as deepfake generation, voice synthesis, and synthetic persona creation. The RAGHAV AI case starkly exemplifies this normative vacuum: the withdrawal of copyright recognition previously granted to an AI co-author, owing to unresolved questions of legal standing, reveals the fundamental inadequacy of static legislative instruments in accommodating dynamic technological realities. Furthermore, India’s personality rights regime, presently constituted through copyright, trademark, passing off doctrine, and constitutional guarantees under Article 21, operates as a composite yet fragmented framework rather than a coherent cause of action. This absence of codification generates doctrinal inconsistency and affords both celebrities and ordinary individuals unpredictable judicial recourse.
- Emerging Judicial Trends
Indian courts have responded to these legislative gaps through notable judicial activism. The Delhi High Court’s decisions in Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India (2023) and Sonakshi Sinha v. Character Technologies Inc. (2026) signal a discernible judicial trajectory: courts have demonstrated a willingness to extend constitutional and tort-based protections against AI-enabled misappropriation through expansive interpretation of Article 21 and the grant of equitable remedies, including ex parte injunctions. Significantly, both decisions drew upon American precedents, namely Bette Midler v. Ford Motor Company and Vanna White v. Samsung Electronics, thereby integrating comparative jurisprudential reasoning into Indian adjudication. This cross-jurisdictional borrowing, while pragmatically necessary given the absence of domestic precedent, carries the risk of importing doctrinal tensions between freedom of expression and personality rights without adequate contextualisation to India’s constitutional framework, within which no equivalent First Amendment balancing doctrine formally exists.
III. Policy Implications
The reactive posture of India’s current regulatory architecture carries substantial policy consequences. The absence of defined standards for platform liability, algorithmic accountability, and the use of personal datasets in AI model training creates an environment in which the commercial exploitation of individual identity may proceed largely unchecked until judicial intervention is sought. The burden of enforcement, presently borne individually by affected parties through civil litigation, is neither scalable nor accessible to non-celebrity individuals whose personality rights are equally deserving of legal protection. NITI Aayog’s Responsible AI framework reflects institutional awareness of these concerns; however, its non-binding character renders it insufficient as an effective governance instrument. Policymakers must therefore give urgent consideration to a tiered legislative model, one that comprehensively addresses deep-fakes, consent-based data use, platform obligations, and distinctions between celebrity and non-celebrity interests, so as to operationalise rights that presently subsist only in doctrinal aspiration.
CONCLUSION
India’s legal framework governing generative artificial intelligence and personality rights remains judicially improvised and structurally inadequate. The existing instruments of copyright, trademark, passing off, and constitutional tort are collectively incapable of furnishing consistent and accessible protection against artificial intelligence-driven identity appropriation in the absence of legislative intervention. The judicial pronouncements in Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India and Sonakshi Sinha v. Unknown, while commendable as immediate remedial measures, serve to underscore the imperative for comprehensive legislative action rather than functioning as substitutes therefor. The First Amendment balancing framework operative in the American jurisdiction further demonstrates that even jurisprudentially mature systems encounter considerable difficulty in attaining doctrinal coherence within this domain. It is therefore submitted that India must enact a dedicated Personality Rights and Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, codifying a statutory right of publicity, imposing platform-level liability, mandating consent-based data protocols, and establishing an independent adjudicatory mechanism, so as to meaningfully honour its constitutional commitments to human dignity and individual autonomy.
REFERENCES
TABLE OF CASES
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan v Aishwaryaworld.com & Ors, 2025 SCC OnLine Del 5943
Anil Kapoor v Simply Life India & Ors, 2023 SCC OnLine Del 6914
Jaikishan Kakubhai Saraf v Peppy Store & Ors, 2024 SCC OnLine Del 3664
R Rajagopal v State of Tamil Nadu (1994) 6 SCC 632
Sonakshi Sinha v Character Technologies Inc & Ors, CS(COMM) 275/2026 (Delhi High Court)
TABLE OF LEGISLATION
Competition Act 2002
Constitution of India, art 21
Copyright Act 1957
Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023
Information Technology Act 2000
Trade Marks Act 1999
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Marrakesh, 15 April 1994)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Journal Articles, Reports and Academic Sources
Faber C, ‘The Right of Publicity and Generative Artificial Intelligence’ World Intellectual Property Organization
Gupta P, ‘Personality Rights under Copyright and Trademark Law’ Indian Journal of Legal Research and Analysis
‘Artificial Intelligence Governance and Legal Challenges’ AJEE Journal
‘Autonomous Personality and Publicity Rights’ Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
‘Freedom of Speech and the Right of Publicity’ Houston Law Review
‘Nature and Scope of Publicity Rights’ Indian Journal of Applied Research
‘Publicity Rights and Intellectual Property’ Golden Gate University School of Law
‘RAGHAV AI and Copyright Recognition in India’ International Journal of Creative Research Thoughts
‘The Right of Privacy’ National Law School of India Review
‘The Right of Publicity and Constitutional Protection’ University of Pennsylvania Law Repository
Online Sources
Astha Ojha, ‘AI Copyright in India: Bridging the Digital Divide’ National e-Governance Division https://negd.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Astha-Ojha-AI-Copyright-in-India-Bridging-the-Digital-Divide.pdf accessed 8 June 2026
Indian Kanoon, ‘Anil Kapoor v Simply Life India & Ors’ https://indiankanoon.org/doc/113724486/ accessed 8 June 2026
Indian Kanoon, ‘Sonakshi Sinha v Character Technologies Inc & Ors’ https://indiankanoon.org/doc/78445148/ accessed 8 June 2026
NLSIR Repository, ‘The Right of Publicity’ https://repository.nls.ac.in/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1259&context=nlsir accessed 8 June 2026
ResearchGate, ‘Regulating Artificial Intelligence in India: Legal Frameworks, Governance Challenges and the Path Toward a Dedicated AI Law’ https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398570892 accessed 8 June 2026
SSRN, ‘Autonomous Personality and Publicity Rights’ https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3553946 accessed 8 June 2026
University of Pennsylvania Law Repository, ‘The Right of Publicity and Constitutional Protection’ https://repository.law.upenn.edu/Documents/Detail/396514 accessed 8 June 2026
WIPO, ‘The Right of Publicity and Generative Artificial Intelligence’ https://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/mdocs/en/wipo_ip_conv_ge_2_25/wipo_ip_conv_ge_2_25_faber.pdf accessed 8 June 2026
[1] https://repository.nls.ac.in/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1259&context=nlsir
[2] https://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1485&context=pubs
[3] http://www.ijar.org.in/stuff/issues/v9-i2(1)/v9-i2(1)-a007.pdf
[4]https://www.researchgate.net/publication/398570892_Regulating_Artificial_Intelligence_in_India_Legal_Frameworks_Governance_Challenges_and_the_Path_Toward_a_Dedicated_AI_Law-_This_research_paper_authored_by_Ganesh_Shrirang_Satarkar_Nale_Department_of_S
[5] https://ijcrt.org/papers/IJCRT2401013.pdf
[6] https://negd.gov.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Astha-Ojha-AI-Copyright-in-India-Bridging-the-Digital-Divide.pdf
[7] https://ajee-journal.com/upload/attaches/att_1764834602.pdf
[8] https://www.wipo.int/edocs/mdocs/mdocs/en/wipo_ip_conv_ge_2_25/wipo_ip_conv_ge_2_25_faber.pdf
[9] https://digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1485&context=pubs
[10] https://www.ijlra.com/public/details/personality-rights-under-copyright-and-trademark-law-by-parv-gupta-
[11] https://repository.law.upenn.edu/Documents/Detail/396514
[12] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3553946
[13] https://houstonlawreview.org/article/4764-freedom-of-speech-and-the-right-of-publicity.pdf
[14] https://indiankanoon.org/doc/78445148/
[15] https://indiankanoon.org/doc/113724486/
