In the past year, three Bollywood actors, a YouTuber and 21-year-old celebrity have all found themselves in court for the same reason: they were made to say and do things they didn’t.

Preity Zinta discovered her face on AI chatbot avatars days after a court order banning deepfakes. Bhuvan Bam saw his likeness resurface in e-commerce posts soon after. Akira Nandan, the son of Andhra Pradesh CM Pawan Kalyan, found an entire AI-generated movie using his name before anyone saw it.

All of them went to court and all of them were successful to some degree. Yet, all of these orders recognise a right that has never been clearly codified in Indian Law: the right to control one's own identity. This leaves a question for the readers. Is Indian jurisprudence moving towards a holistic right to privacy against the misuse of digital identity, or is the court just reacting to the problem with a traditional remedy? The truth is in the middle. That uncertainty is important for businesses, platforms, and talent management companies dealing with AI-generated impersonation.

PERSONALITY RIGHTS IN INDIA: BORROWED, NOT BUILT

India does not have a dedicated law on personality rights or publicity rights, whereas several US states have enacted their own legislation on the same. What exists today has been constructed, case by case, over 30 years since the constitutional right to privacy, was formally recognised rather than from celebrity culture.

The first step is the Supreme Court’s (SC) recognition that privacy is a fundamental right. A nine-judge bench, in R. Rajagopal v State of Tamil Nadu (the Auto Shankar case), later extended this zone of privacy to public figures. Neither the State nor the press could enter that zone without consent.

In Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v Union of India, the SC established that privacy is a fundamental part of Article 21, which guarantees life and personal liberty. Puttaswamy’s challenge to the Aadhar biometric scheme later gave courts their vocabulary. When an image, a voice, or a likeness of a person is used without permission, courts treat control over one’s identity as a matter of personal liberty and not as a favour granted by the state. There is also a civil doctrine that runs in parallel to this constitutional doctrine, and is a commercial one at heart. Delhi High Court (DHC) held in D.M. Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. v Baby Gift House & Ors., that singer Daler Mehndi's persona had acquired quasi-property rights, since unauthorised dolls reproduced his voice without his consent. Courts have applied similar logic in ICC Development (International) Ltd v Arvee Enterprises, and Titan Industries Ltd v Ramkumar Jewelers.  In both cases , the courts protected against unauthorised commercial use of the celebrity's identity in advertisements, even though no formal trademark existed.

In this line, Anil Kapoor v Simply Life India, 2023, is a relevant precedent where the Court condemned AI right of swap content projecting Kapoor's face onto other actors and the unauthorised use of his name, voice, image, and catchphrase, Jhakaas. This rule was designed to protect individual’s right of publicity against digital copying and prevent third parties from exploiting their likeness to create illusive deepfakes or conversational AI chatbots without consent.

THREE CASES, THREE DIFFERENT PROBLEMS

Preity Zinta v Google, Meta & X

Justice Abhay Ahuja of the Bombay High Court (BHC) gave Preity Zinta permission on 16 June 2026 to directly sue social media companies such as Google, Meta and X Corp, and other digital platforms for AI-generated deepfakes, morphed images, and chatbot personas featuring her face and voice. What makes this case so unique is that the platforms are the principal respondents and not the proforma defendants as in earlier cases. The platforms generate content, index it and re-upload it to many platforms at once with the platform as the only real area of accountability. The BHC asked Google and Meta to resolve the issue by issuing a takedown in early July 2026, which was set for a further hearing.

Bhuvan Bam v John Does

The DHC in its initial January 2026 order did not extend the protection of personality rights to the actor. By April 2026, the Delhi HC was back hearing the case, and Justice Jyoti Singh, while reiterating the earlier order, failed to make any finding on his personality rights directly. The Court did, however, find a strong prima facie case and broadened the injunction to include more intermediaries and e-commerce platforms, noting that  a single takedown order would not be able to keep up with the rapid regeneration of such content.

Akira Nandan v Sambhawaami Studios

This case was the most doctrinally significant, since the entire film was created using the name of private citizen Akira Nandan. Nandan’s recognition is mostly through his family, mainly through his father who is the Deputy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.

Justice Tushar Rao Gedela granted ad-interim ex-parte injunction in the case of Akira Desai alias Akira Nandan v Sambhawaami Studios LLP to restrain the release of AI Love Story and no further usage of his name, voice, likeness, or mannerisms. The order was more comprehensive than in previous cases in two ways: it applied to the distortion of persona in both physical and virtual spaces including the metaverse and that the court sought the assistance of senior counsel in developing a mechanism for future controversies.

A parallel precedent cited by the Court is Sadhguru Jagadish Vasudev & Anr. v Igor Isakov & Ors., where Justice Saurabh Banerjee granted a dynamic injunction, and directed the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to block infringing platforms. This brought the executive on board in enforcing a judge-made right.

IS THIS A NEW IP RIGHT?

The straightforward analysis of these orders is that Indian courts are expanding remedies and defendants, not creating a new right. A genuine Intellectual property right has clear elements and well-defined statutory test, which is a set of criteria that a court can apply mechanically once the facts are established. There is none of this in India yet. There is an increasing trend of relief i.e., one interim order at a time. That trend can be seen on two fronts: who is entitled to the right, and what are the reliefs a court is willing to grant.

But unlike Anil Kapoor or Preity Zinta, Akira Nandan wasn't a celebrity in his own right. The DHC's willingness to protect him suggests it is moving away from a mere focus on celebrities and publicity and towards a broader right to not have one's identity exploited when there is enough public recognition of it.

A recurring theme in the Bhuvan Bam, Akira Nandan and Sadhguru orders, is an architecture of pre-emptive, dynamic orders against an unknown infringer, backed by a named defendant. Courts directly instruct government departments to remove entire categories of websites within limited timeframes of 36 to 72 hours. This is a key difference from earlier orders, which targeted named defendants over a specific use.

The doctrinal test itself hasn’t actually expanded. The salient feature of the doctrinal test for determining whether a right has actually been created is the test itself; every order discussed here are interim or ex parte, granted on a prima facie showing, without a defence tested at trial, and without a reasoned final judgment based on the plaintiff's claim and the defendant's right to parody, comment or create.

The substantive test is, in effect, still an open question lies, as shown by Justice Gedela's invitation to counsel in Akira Nandan to help design a procedural framework for it. From a different perspective: Justice Singh was asked to revise the Bhuvan Bam injunction within three months of the first order. This indicates the remedy is still being calibrated case by case.

In other words, the idea of the right today is a growing mass of remedies, not a rectilinear right with well-known limits. The limits that may be challenged by satire, journalism or AI commentary, and that could yet be tested by it. These orders show a trend towards a unified right; however, the attainment of one is not found here.

THE INSTITUTIONAL GAP: COURTS ACTING, PARLIAMENT WATCHING

This is a pattern of ad hoc, court-created solutions that lack a clear statutory definition, as evidenced by two comparative examples.

Article 50 of the EU AI Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) imposes a disclosure regime (which does not include a personal right of action) but does have a fixed date (2 August 2026) and fixed penalties (up to €15 million or 3% of global turnover). It applies directly to this problem.

Tennessee’s Ensuring Likeness Voice and Image Security Act, known as ELVIS Act, goes one step further. It expressly incorporates AI voice cloning into the state's right-of-publicity statute, establishing civil and criminal liability for knowingly distributing an unauthorised replica.  Liability extends to anyone who distributes a tool whose primary purpose is to produce an unauthorised replica. The Act also adds a fair-use carve-out for comment, criticism and parody a line that Indian courts have not yet been asked to draw.

While India has indeed moved to pass The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, it was not written with impersonation in mind. The IT Rules amendments notified by MeitY on 22 October 2025 go further, by specifying synthetically generated information and imposing obligations on the platforms. But they do not clearly give the misappropriated individual a personal cause of action. Since the law continues to lag behind, relief will likely continue to come through injunctions.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR STAKEHOLDERS RIGHT NOW

The path ahead for platforms and tech companies is clear on one point: they’re likely to be exposed, as primary actors and not only as accessories. They are likely to have a timeline for compliance that is far shorter than the 45-day window allotted under the Rules which has been effectively reduced to 36 hours in practice, and which was further shortened to 3 hours in the  February 2026 IT amendments Rules. Crucially these new rules introduce a new parallel of labelling and verification obligation. All of this is distinct from the liability platforms face if a claim is actually brought.

Media houses, production companies, and talent agencies should take note of the Akira Nandan order. It means a person doesn't have to be a career public figure to get protection. The scope of exposure is not just limited to static images, but extends to synthetic voice, mannerisms and even metaverse avatars. This marks the shift from the older, narrower commercial endorsement model that it has come to represent. When advising on risk, the honest answer is this: it's easier to obtain interim relief than it is to get a considered view as to who's liable.

CONCLUSION

On the available evidence, Indian courts are not yet creating a new intellectual property right. Rather, courts are expanding privacy, passing off, and copyright-based remedies in four ways: addressing synthetic media harms, extending protection to more individuals, broadening the category of probable claimants, and fast-tracking the availability of relief. This imitates a movement towards doctrinal convergence without creating an integrated legal right.

This wouldn’t be a strange path for Indian rights to take. The right to privacy developed the same way accrued gradually, case by case, from Rajagopal nearly 40 years ago, through subsequent defamation and surveillance cases, until Puttaswamy finally had a settled constitutional home in 2017.

Personality rights may be following the same path, just at a brisker pace, since AI-generated impersonation creates novel fact patterns faster than any earlier technology. Parliament has a live, contemporaneous chance to intervene, before the doctrine becomes completely entrenched. It can act through the IT Rules amendments already underway, or through specific legislation as the state of Tennessee and EU have done.

Either way, India has two possible futures. One, the right is carved by the free expression clause, through an eventual HC's ruling in favour of a genuine defence. Second, the right is designed from the start by Parliament. Until one of those two events occurs, Indian law will keep building incrementally, order by order. The legislation which would fill in the final details is still in the drafting process. But even people who haven't been celebrities before now can expect that their identity will be protected as a right, and not just a matter of fiat.

*Authored by - Devansh Bansal, 4th year B.A.LL.B. (Hons.) student at Symbiosis Law School, Nagpur. Views expressed are personal.