Delhi High Court protects Nagarjuna's personality rights; bars misuse of his name

The Delhi High Court recently passed an order protecting the personality rights of Telugu actor Akkineni Nagarjuna [Akkineni Nagarjuna v Www.BFXXX.Org & Ors].

In an order passed on September 25, Justice Tejas Karia said that Nagarjuna's name, image, likeness and persona have acquired a unique distinctiveness and any third party found using any elements of his persona is bound to cause confusion and deception amongst the general public regarding affiliation with/sponsorship. 

"The exploitation of one’s personality rights puts at risk not only their economic interests but also their right to live with dignity, potentially causing immeasurable harm to their reputation and goodwill as the adoption of the attributes such as name, image, likeness unauthorizedly will inevitably cause confusion in the minds of the members of the public regarding association with / endorsement by the Plaintiff," the Court observed.

The Court restrained the defendants (including unknown persons or John Doe) from using Nagarjuna's name, image, likeness or any other attributes of his persona which are exclusively identifiable with him.

Further, the Court also ordered the blocking of the URLs infringing on Nagarjuna's personality rights.

The Court passed the order on a plea filed by the Telugu film star raising concerns that his personality rights were being violated through the unauthorised use of his image in content uploaded on social media, as well as in merchandise.

Nagarjuna's counsel had emphasised that the actor has a considerable reputation which is now at risk because of unauthorised content misusing the actor's image, including AI-generated content that uses morphed images of him, which are uploaded on YouTube and other such platforms.

Further, his lawyer also flagged concerns that such misuse is bound to get worse if such morphed content is allowed to be used for the training of Artificial Intelligence (AI) models.

Senior Advocate Vaibhav Gaggar with Advocates Pravin Anand, Vaishali R Mittal, Vibhav Mithal, Shivang Sharma, Somdev Tiwari, Abhishek Nair and Vansh Shrivastav appeared for Nagarjuna.

[Read Order]