PERSONALITY RIGHTS

• Personality rights are the rights of a person to protect their identity, including their name, voice, signature, images, and any other feature easily identified by the public.
• Personality rights are not expressly mentioned in a statute in India but are traced to fall under the right to privacy and the right to property.
• The closest statute to protect personality rights is Article 21 of the Constitution of India under rights to privacy and publicity.
• Other statutory provisions protecting personality rights include the Copyright Act, 1957. According to the Act, moral rights are only granted to authors and performers, including actors, singers, musicians, and dancers.
• The provisions of the Act mandate that the Authors or the Performers have the right to be given credit or claim authorship of their work and also have a right to restrain others from causing any kind of damage to their work.
• The Indian Trademarks Act, 1999 also protects personal rights under Section 14, which restricts the use of personal names and representations.
• The Delhi High Court and the Madras High Court have passed interim orders protecting the personality rights of celebrities, but the law is still at a nascent stage in India.
• Celebrities often register some aspects of their personality as trademarks to use them commercially. For example, Usain Bolt's "bolting" or lightning pose is a registered trademark.

4. How have Indian courts decided so far?

• In a recent case, the Delhi High Court granted an ex-parte, omnibus injunction restraining 16 entities from using actor Anil Kapoor's name, likeness, and image for commercial purposes.
• The court also granted an injunction against the use of technological tools like Artificial Intelligence, face morphing, and GIFs to create unauthorised versions of Kapoor.
• In an earlier case, the Delhi High Court had issued a similar injunction against the unauthorised use of Amitabh Bachchan's personality rights.
• The court had injuncted the use of variations of his name such as "Big B", his unique style of addressing the computer as "'Computer ji", and his catchphrase "lock kiya jaye".
• In 2015, the Madras High Court observed that "personality right vests on those persons, who have attained the status of celebrity".
• The court's observation came in the actor Rajnikanth's lawsuit against the producers of the movie "Main hoon Rajnikanth", claiming that his name, image, and style of delivering dialogues had infringed on his personality rights.
• The court said that the producers after admitting that the actor has a high reputation can't now say that Rajnikanth is a common name.

5. When can the Court grant an injunction?

The Delhi High Court has listed out the following elements comprising the liability for infringement of the right of publicity:

• The right has to be valid. This means that the court must be satisfied that the "plaintiff owns an enforceable right in the identity or persona of a human being."
• The celebrity must be easily identifiable in the alleged misuse. "The celebrity must be identifiable from the defendant’s unauthorized use Infringement of right of publicity requires no proof of falsity, confusion, or deception, especially when the celebrity is identifiable," the HC had said.
• The defendant must have intended to trade upon the identity of the plaintiff, from which identifiability can be presumed.

6. Conclusion

In essence, the protection of personality rights in India remains a developing area of law, with celebrities increasingly seeking legal recourse to safeguard their distinct identities in an evolving digital landscape.