With the Delhi high court denying actor Jahnvi Kapoor a broad injunction in her personality rights case, industry experts say the court is essentially drawing a line between protecting personality rights and policing the Internet. The risk now for celebrities is therefore one of enforcement economics rather than entitlement.
As a result, many have begun engaging specialist IP protection teams and, alongside them, brand protection vendors that crawl platforms and generate the link schedules that go into these efforts.
The practical challenge for actors will be to monitor issues more closely and approach the court with precise, narrowly tailored relief rather than seeking a sweeping restraint.
Sharper policing
“Celebrities are becoming more conscious of unauthorized use of their name, image, voice and likeness, and of the reputational harm that can follow. What it does require is a more specialized and proactive system for monitoring content, preserving evidence, issuing takedown requests and moving the court swiftly where required,” said Neeha Nagpal, founding and managing partner at N & Company Legal.
In that sense, personality-rights protection is increasingly becoming an ongoing legal and reputation-management exercise. The emphasis is likely to be on speed, precision and proper documentation rather than simply having a bigger legal team, Nagpal added.
What is visible is a rise in enquiries, with law firms reporting more approaches from actors, athletes and creators worried about AI copies of their identity, agreed Viren Vesuwala, lead PR, communications and strategic partnerships at independent digital marketing agency White Rivers Media.
“The work has also changed shape. Deepfakes, voice cloning, fake accounts and unauthorized endorsements sit closer to everyday social content than to old merchandising disputes, and cases now pull in Meta, Google and X. The money is going into monitoring and specialist counsel rather than headcount,” Vesuwala added.
Free-speech line
To be sure, industry experts feel Delhi High Court's refusal to grant a blanket injunction is a positive development for free expression and legitimate commercial speech. Films, and particularly, the celebrities are an integral part of India's popular culture, and an unnecessarily expansive ban on the use of their aspects of personality could diminish the value of legitimate fan engagement, artistic expression, commentary, satire, and so on.
At the same time, according to Siddharth Tewari, partner at Ascendus Law Partners, the ruling indicates that celebrities seeking to enforce their personality rights have to meet a higher evidentiary burden.
Rather than obtaining a sweeping order against thousands of URLs at once, petitioners may be required to demonstrate specifically how each category of content infringes their rights, whether by being obscene or pornographic, violating personality-related commercial or publicity rights, or causing reputational harm.
The practical risk is that unauthorized commercial exploitation of a celebrity's persona could, in certain cases, continue under the garb of free expression or commercial speech until a court is convinced that the particular use meets the standard which requires coercive action.
Narrower claims
“There is a visible shift, and personality rights is now a distinct practice line rather than an occasional filing. Celebrities are engaging specialist IP litigation teams and, alongside them, brand protection vendors who crawl platforms and generate the link schedules that go into these suits,” Sonam Chandwani, managing partner, KS Legal & Associates said.
That said, the money doesn’t always buy good strategy, according to Chandwani. Compiling seven thousand links is data collection, not advocacy, and it hands the platform its best argument, which is that most of the material is innocuous and no intermediary can manually adjudicate that volume.
“The better investment is in narrower, well evidenced claims built around the commercial core of the right, that is unauthorized endorsement, merchandising, impersonation accounts and synthetic content, because that is where the persona is being treated as property and where courts are willing to intervene decisively,” she said.
Whack-a-mole
To be sure, the practical difficulty celebrities face as a result of such orders is that they have to identify and categorize the offending material each time and establish why a particular category of content deserves restraint. With content capable of being replicated across hundreds of platforms overnight, enforcement risks becoming a game of whack-a-mole.
In practice, the right to seek protection against obscene content remains strong, but having to repeatedly enforce that right against each instance of such content can be a cumbersome and tiresome process.
According to Shama Mahajan, assistant professor of law, BITS Law School, the categorization of the URLs sought in the Jahnvi Kapoor case is a step in that direction, allowing courts to identify at an interim stage whether personality rights are implicated and violated while balancing free-speech interests when celebrities are involved.
Aishwarya Kaushiq, partner, BTG Advaya agreed that if courts are reluctant to grant wide-ranging or omnibus injunctions, the real cost lies in having to constantly engage lawyers and approach the courts each time fresh offending content surfaces, which, in today's digital environment, can happen almost overnight.
“Deepfakes, fake accounts and manipulated content can be replicated across platforms with remarkable speed. Continuously tracking such material, identifying specific infringements and seeking fresh or extended takedown relief can itself become an expensive exercise,” Kaushiq added.