The Personality Behind The Work Tracing The Contours Of Personality Rights Under Indian Copyright Law

Anup Koushki Karavadi and Kanishk Tiwari

Introduction

In the collective imagination of Indian popular culture, certain expressions have become inseparable from the personalities who coined them. The irreverent “Bhidu” of Jackie Shroff, the resonant baritone of Amitabh Bachchan, or the poised elegance of Aishwarya Rai. These traits transcend the screen to form part of the celebrity’s persona, a unique identity that carries immense emotional and commercial resonance. Yet, in today’s age of artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and boundless digital reproduction, the same traits that once built stardom are being mimicked, commodified, and circulated without consent.

What was once confined to admiration and fandom has now turned into an industry of digital imitation, where voices, faces, and gestures are recreated through algorithms, often eroding both the moral and economic sanctity of a celebrity’s identity. This has prompted an unprecedented shift, personalities now seeking legal recognition not only for their creative expressions but also for their very image and aura. It is an evolution that the Copyright Act, 1957, never envisaged when it sought to protect the moral rights of authors and performers.

The growing judicial attention to such claims reflects a broader tension between creativity, commercial exploitation, and personal integrity. Personality rights, though not statutorily defined, sit at the intersection of copyright’s moral rights doctrine and the broader principles of identity and dignity. They invite a reconsideration of how law perceives individuality, as a moral extension of authorship, a proprietary economic asset, or both.

This article seeks to trace the contours of personality rights within the framework of Indian copyright law, examining how moral authorship and commercial value converge in protecting celebrity identity in the digital era of replication and simulated fame.

Conceptual Framework: Personality Rights and Their Global Evolution

The Making of a Commercial Identity

Every famous person carries something that becomes uniquely theirs, maybe the tone of a voice, the rhythm of speech, or even a single word that turns into cultural shorthand. In India, cinema has played a defining role in this process. When audiences hear the word “Bhidu,” they instinctively think of Jackie Shroff. The same is true for the style and mannerisms that make up Amitabh Bachchan’s or Shah Rukh Khan’s public image. These are not just artistic expressions; they are personal identifiers that hold both emotional and commercial value.¹ Over time, this association between an individual’s image and their economic worth gave rise to what we now call personality rights.²

Two Ways of Looking at Personality

Broadly speaking, the law has approached the protection of personality in two ways. One view treats it as an extension of personal dignity that is the right of a person to decide how much of their identity is shared with the world.³ This idea, sometimes called the “privacy” approach, originates in the late nineteenth century when Warren and Brandeis wrote that individuals must have the right “to be let alone.”⁴

The second view sees personality as property, a valuable asset that can be licensed, transferred, or exploited for commercial gain.⁵ In countries such as the United States, this “publicity” approach has developed into a specific legal right, allowing a person to stop others from profiting off their name or likeness.⁶ Civil-law countries like Germany and France recognise personality as part of a person’s inherent moral integrity, blending both dignity and economic value.⁷

India’s position falls somewhere in between. Because there is no single law on personality rights, courts have borrowed principles from constitutional privacy, trademark, and copyright to fill the gaps.⁸ This has produced a system that is partly moral and partly economic, depending on how each case is argued.

How the Idea Grew Around the World

The notion that someone can own their image or voice is not new. In the United States, Professor Melville Nimmer first wrote about the “right of publicity” in 1954, arguing that a person’s identity could have economic value separate from their creative work.⁹ Since then, many American states, including California, have recognised this right either through statute or through court decisions.¹⁰ Germany’s Kunsturhebergesetz and its constitutional protection of human dignity treat the image and likeness of a person as inviolable, while France’s Civil Code gives similar protection to one’s private life and image.¹¹ These developments show that personality rights can arise from very different foundations, sometimes from dignity, sometimes from property, but they serve the same purpose i.e., to stop others from taking unfair advantage of who someone is.¹²

The Digital Turn

With the rise of artificial intelligence and social media, the misuse of personal identity has reached new levels. Deepfakes, voice cloning, and image manipulation now allow anyone with a smartphone to reproduce a celebrity’s likeness convincingly.¹³ This has turned admiration into imitation, and imitation into economic harm. As seen recently in India, where several actors and musicians have approached courts over fake endorsements and AI-generated videos, the digital landscape has forced the law to evolve faster than before.¹⁴ Yet the underlying question remains unchanged: how far should the law go in protecting identity without stifling creativity, satire, or public discourse?¹⁵

Reading Personality Rights in Today’s Context

In India, the conversation around personality rights has moved from academic journals to courtrooms. What began as a moral question, whether someone can stop others from misusing their name, has now become a commercial and technological one. As the next part of this article will show, the Copyright Act of 1957, though not originally designed for this purpose, has slowly become one of the main tools for protecting identity. It provides a moral foundation for the idea that creative and personal expression cannot be distorted or misused without consent. The following discussion examines how far this law can go in recognising and enforcing such rights.

Statutory Framework under the Copyright Act, 1957 in India

Moral Rights of the Author

Under Copyright Act, 1957, one of the key provisions granting personal protection to creators is Section 57, titled “Author’s Special Rights.” The first clause states that

“Independently of the author’s copyright and even after the assignment either wholly or partially of the said copyright, the author of a work shall have the right—
(a) to claim authorship of the work; and
(b) to restrain or claim damages in respect of any distortion, mutilation, modification or other act… if such distortion, mutilation, modification or other act would be prejudicial to his honour or reputation.”¹⁶

Importantly, this right continues even after assignment of the economic rights.¹⁷ The intent behind Section 57 is to safeguard the creator’s connection with his or her work, beyond mere financial control.¹⁸ The moral right to attribution (sub-clause (a)) and to protect integrity (sub-clause (b)) gives authors a personal stake in how the work is represented.¹⁹ For example, courts have held that even the destruction of an artistic work may amount to a violation of the integrity right.²⁰ However, while Section 57 protects authors of literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, it does not by its terms extend to all of the attributes of a celebrity’s persona (such as name, image, style or catchphrase). That gap becomes important when one considers how personality rights claims look today.²¹

Performers’ Rights

Another relevant part of the Act is the regime for “performers”. The Act defines a performer as “a person who acts, sings, delivers, plays in, or otherwise performs … a dramatic, musical or artistic work or any other work” (Section 2(q)). In recent years, the Act was amended to insert Sections 38A and 38B, which grant certain exclusive and moral rights to persons who qualify as performers.²²

Section 38A gives exclusive rights to a performer with respect to fixation and reproduction of performance.²³ Section 38B gives moral rights to performers in respect of adverse treatment of their performance that is prejudicial to their honour or reputation.²⁴ These provisions represent the closest statutory protection for what might be thought of as “performer persona” in India.²⁵

Yet, there are limitations. The performer’s rights under these sections apply only to the performance as fixed (recorded) and do not cover, say, the persona of the performer in its entirety or unauthorised commercial use of name or likeness outside of the recorded performance context.²⁶

The Gap Between Persona and the Text of the Act

Taken together, Sections 57, 38A and 38B show that the Indian statute provides personal, non-economic protection for authors and performers, but the statute does not explicitly grant a standalone “right of personality” covering name, image, likeness or catch-phrase for all commercial uses.²⁷ The lack of a specific statutory provision means that many personality-rights claims rely on analogy or overlapping doctrines (e.g., passing off, trademark, right to privacy) rather than direct legislation.²⁸

Because the Act focuses on the work (and in the case of performers, the performance) rather than the person behind the work, questions arise where technology allows a celebrity’s image or voice to be used without direct recording of their performance (for example, in deepfakes). The statutory framework thus shows both promise and limitation when applied to modern personality-based claims.

Judicial Recognition of Personality Rights in India

The Shift from Privacy to Property

Indian courts began approaching personality-based disputes through the lens of privacy and dignity. Early decisions linked protection of identity to the constitutional guarantee of life and personal liberty under Article 21. In R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, the Supreme Court recognised that every individual enjoys a right to safeguard their personal life and image from unauthorised publication, except where such information is already part of the public record.²⁹ This case laid the foundation for viewing identity as something that the individual controls, even against the press or public curiosity.

Over time, however, as celebrity culture and commercial endorsements grew, courts began treating the persona of a well-known individual as having independent market value. In the absence of a statutory right, Indian judges have used a blend of trademark, passing-off, and copyright principles to grant protection.³⁰

Building Blocks of Indian Jurisprudence

One of the earliest attempts to address the commercial dimension of personality came from the Delhi High Court, which held that unauthorised commercial use of a celebrity’s name or likeness may amount to “false endorsement” and unfair competition.³¹ Similarly, when performers’ recorded images and voices were used without permission, courts relied on the moral-rights provisions of the Copyright Act to stop such misuse.³²

Over the years, courts have developed certain guiding principles:

1. the claimant must have an identifiable persona or reputation capable of commercial exploitation;
2. there must be unauthorised use likely to cause association or advantage to another; and
3. a connection with commercial gain or false suggestion of endorsement strengthens the claim.³³

These principles have now become the touchstone for judicial protection of identity, whether the claim is styled as passing off, copyright infringement, or a violation of privacy.

Contemporary Trends and the Digital Age

In the past few years, the Delhi and Bombay High Courts have seen a surge of lawsuits filed by actors, singers, and spiritual figures to restrain unauthorised use of their names, voices, and likenesses, especially in the form of deepfakes and AI-generated media.³⁴ The courts have shown readiness to grant interim injunctions and “John Doe” or Ashok Kumar orders to prevent continuing misuse where the infringers are unknown.³⁵

Recent orders emphasise that the commercial value of fame deserves protection, but they also caution against overbroad injunctions that might chill legitimate expression such as parody, satire, or news reporting.³⁶ This balancing act reflects an awareness that while personality rights protect an individual’s control over their image, they must coexist with the public’s right to comment, critique, and create derivative art.³⁷

Limits and Unresolved Issues

Despite these developments, several questions remain open. The most significant is the lack of clarity on whether personality rights are inheritable or survive the death of the individual. Some High Courts have suggested that they are personal and die with the person, while others have hinted that heirs may control posthumous commercial use of a celebrity’s image.³⁸ Another unresolved issue is the threshold of fame: whether such rights belong only to established celebrities or to any individual whose image is commercially misused.³⁹

There is also inconsistency in judicial reasoning. Some orders rest on privacy under Article 21, others on property-like control over commercial value, and still others on moral-rights analogies from copyright.⁴⁰ The lack of uniform reasoning shows that the Indian experience remains judicially driven, piecemeal, and dependent on the creativity of counsel and judges in fitting facts into existing doctrines.

The Emerging Consensus

Despite differences, the larger direction of Indian law is clear. Courts now recognise that a person’s identity, whether expressed through name, voice, image, or mannerism, is not open for unauthorised commercial exploitation.⁴¹ While privacy law guards dignity, and copyright law guards creative expression, personality rights bridge both. They are rapidly becoming an essential component of how the law understands individuality in the age of instant digital reproduction.

Remedies and Enforcement

As discussed earlier, courts in India have increasingly treated unauthorised commercial use of personality as a civil wrong capable of being restrained through injunctions.¹⁸ The primary remedies available include:

• Permanent and Interim Injunctions – to prevent continued unauthorised use of name, likeness, or performance.⁴²
• Damages or Account of Profits – allowing recovery based on economic harm or unjust enrichment of the infringer.⁴³
• Delivery Up and Take-Down Orders – particularly effective in digital contexts, where platforms are directed to remove infringing content.⁴⁴
• John Doe (Ashok Kumar) Orders – preventive injunctions against unidentified wrongdoers, commonly granted in personality and piracy cases.⁴⁵

However, enforcement remains uneven. Many injunctions are granted ex parte, often without hearing the other side, raising concerns about overbreadth and free expression.⁴⁶ Courts have therefore begun specifying carve-outs for satire, parody, and legitimate commentary to avoid chilling speech.⁴⁷

Criminal sanctions under the Copyright Act are technically available for unauthorised reproduction of performances, but their use in personality-rights disputes is rare.⁴⁸ Most plaintiffs rely on civil suits for injunctions and damages, occasionally coupled with claims under the Information Technology Act, 2000 for digital misuse.⁴⁹

The Broader Picture

What emerges from these developments is a pattern of judicial creativity filling legislative silence. Courts have extended the moral and proprietary logic of copyright to cover situations it was never designed for. This pragmatic approach, while effective in the short term, has left the doctrine fragmented. Without statutory clarity, each case becomes an exercise in balancing competing interests, reputation versus expression, property versus privacy, and human dignity versus market value.

Ultimately, the convergence of copyright and personality rights reflects a single truth: in the digital economy, a person’s identity is as much a product of creation as any copyrighted work. Until the legislature steps in, courts will continue to improvise, borrowing principles from moral rights to keep pace with technologies that can imitate a person as easily as they can copy a painting.

Conclusion

Personality rights in India have evolved not through legislative foresight but through judicial improvisation. What began as a privacy-driven idea, protecting an individual from unwanted intrusion, has gradually expanded into a property-like concept rooted in commercial reality. The courts have filled the vacuum left by Parliament, reading elements of identity protection into existing legal frameworks such as the Copyright Act, the Trademarks Act, and the tort of passing off.

This gradual development shows two parallel truths. First, identity today is a form of capital. A celebrity’s voice, likeness, or catchphrase carries immense economic value and can be exploited like any other asset. Second, identity remains an expression of human dignity that deserves respect, not only for its commercial worth but also for what it represents personally. The challenge for law is to accommodate both without allowing one to overpower the other.

The Copyright Act’s moral-rights provisions reflect the moral foundation that personality rights rest upon. Yet the statute’s focus on the “work” rather than the “person” leaves substantial gaps, particularly in cases of AI-generated replicas or digital misappropriation. Performers’ rights offer limited relief, they protect the performance, not the performer’s individuality. Courts have therefore extended these provisions by analogy, using injunctions, John Doe orders, and take-down directives to curb misuse. But this patchwork approach cannot substitute for a coherent statutory regime.

India now stands at a point where legislative recognition of personality rights is no longer optional. A dedicated framework could define the contours of these rights, identify permissible uses such as parody and news reporting, and establish their duration and inheritance. Such a framework would prevent overreach while safeguarding the moral and economic sanctity of human identity.

Until that happens, the intersection of copyright and personality will continue to be navigated case by case, driven by the moral impulse to respect individuality in an age where technology can imitate anyone, but authenticity still belongs only to the person themselves.

References

1. Adyasha Mohanty, What Are Personality Rights? The Rise of Celebrity Lawsuits Explained, SCC OnLine Blog (Oct. 17, 2025) ¶ 1.
2. Protection of Personality Rights in India: Issues and Challenges, 1 IPR J. MNLU Nagpur 44, 44–45 (Agnes Augustian 2023).
3. Aparajita Lath, Personality Rights: The Law Must Not Overprotect Fame, Supreme Ct. Observer (Oct. 29, 2025).
4. Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, 4 Harv. L. Rev. 193, 195 (1890).
5. Melville B. Nimmer, The Right of Publicity, 19 Law & Contemp. Probs. 203, 216 (1954).
6. Restatement (Third) of Unfair Competition § 46 (Am. L. Inst. 1995); Cal. Civ. Code § 3344 (West 2023).
7. German Civil Code § 12; Kunsturhebergesetz §§ 22–23; Basic Law arts. 1–2 (Ger. 1949); Code Civ. [Fr.] art. 9 (1804).
8. Augustian, supra note 2, at 45–46.
9. Nimmer, supra note 5, at 203.
10. Dogan & Lemley, What the Right of Publicity Can Learn From Trademark Law, 58 Stan. L. Rev. 1161, 1162–63 (2006).
11. Id. at 1165; see also Lauber-Rönsberg, The Commercial Exploitation of Personality Features in Germany, 107 Trademark Rep. 803, 812 (2017).
12. Saurabh Gupta, From “Jhakaas” and “Bhidu” to Sadhguru: The Celebrity Scramble for Personality Rights, LiveLaw (Oct. 24, 2025) ¶ 9.
13. Id. ¶ 10.
14. Mohanty, supra note 1, ¶ 4.
15. Lath, supra note 3, ¶ 7.
16. Copyright Act, 1957 § 57(1)(a)-(b) (India).
17. See Sana Singh, Moral Rights Under Copyright Law, Unimarks Legal (Feb. 17, 2021).
18. Id.
19. See The Author’s Right to Attribution (or Not), Law Matters (Nov. 6, 2015).
20. See Amar Nath Sehgal v. Union of India, 2005 (30) PTC 253 (Del) (holding that destruction of a mural was violation of integrity right).
21. See Agnes Augustian, Protection of Personality Rights in India: Issues and Challenges, 1 IPR J. MNLU Nagpur 44, 49 (2023).
22. Copyright Act, 1957 §§ 38A-38B (as inserted by Copyright (Amendment) Act, 2012).
23. See Performers’ Rights in India, Indian Journal of Law, Polity (PDF) at 2.
24. Id. at 3.
25. See What Are Personality Rights? The Rise of Celebrity Lawsuits Explained, SCC OnLine Blog (Oct. 17, 2025) ¶ 3.
26. See Legal Issues Surrounding Performers and Broadcasting Rights in the Age of AI, IJIRL Vol. V Issue II, 2025, at 247.
27. Augustian, supra note 21, at 50–51.
28. Id. at 51.
29. R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, (1994) 6 SCC 632, 641 ¶ 26.
30. Agnes Augustian, Protection of Personality Rights in India: Issues and Challenges, 1 IPR J. MNLU Nagpur 44, 45 (2023).
31. Id. at 46; see also Aparajita Lath, Personality Rights: The Law Must Not Overprotect Fame, Supreme Ct. Observer (Oct. 29, 2025).
32. Amar Nath Sehgal v. Union of India, 2005 (30) PTC 253 (Del) ¶ 47 (applying § 57 to protect integrity of artistic work).
33. Augustian, supra note 30, at 47–48.
34. Adyasha Mohanty, What Are Personality Rights? The Rise of Celebrity Lawsuits Explained, SCC OnLine Blog (Oct. 17, 2025) ¶¶ 4–5.
35. Id. ¶ 6.
36. Saurabh Gupta, From “Jhakaas” and “Bhidu” to Sadhguru: The Celebrity Scramble for Personality Rights, LiveLaw (Oct. 24, 2025) ¶¶ 18–19.
37. Id. ¶ 22.
38. Mohanty, supra note 34, ¶ 7 (noting Delhi High Court denied posthumous relief in Sushant Singh Rajput matter).
39. Augustian, supra note 30, at 48 (questioning limitation to celebrities alone).
40. Lath, supra note 31, ¶ 8.
41. Id. ¶ 10.
42. Saurabh Gupta, supra note 36, ¶ 14.
43. Protection of Personality Rights in India, supra note 30, at 51.
44. Mohanty, supra note 34, ¶ 11.
45. Id. ¶ 12.
46. Lath, supra note 31, ¶ 10.
47. Gupta, supra note 36, ¶ 18.
48. Copyright Act, 1957, § 63 (criminal penalties).
49. Information Technology Act, 2000, §§ 66E, 67.