Delhi High Court protects personality rights of Arjun Kapoor

The Delhi High Court has restrained various social media handles and websites from exploiting Bollywood actor Arjun Kapoor’s personality rights, including selling merchandise featuring his name or image..Justice Tushar Rao Gedela on April 29 passed an ex parte interim injunction to protect Kapoor's personality rights.The Court directed Google and Meta to take down infringing URL links and also provide Basic Subscriber Information (BSI) of the persons operating social media accounts to circulate the infringing content. The Court found that these defendants were unauthorizedly misappropriating Kapoor's personality and publicity rights for unlawful financial gains."Clearly, there is no permission or license granted by the plaintiff to any of the defendants for exploitation of his personality/publicity rights," the Bench noted..Any exploitation of his rights without permission or license of the actor would demonstrably constitute infringement of his personality or publicity rights, the Court ruled..The order was passed on a suit moved by Kapoor for protection of his personality rights. Advocate Pravin Anand, representing the actor, submitted that his personality rights were being commercially exploited through the sale of merchandise such as T-shirts and posters, as well as for unauthorised event bookings.He also flagged obscene and pornographic content circulating online, including AI-generated sexually explicit deepfakes..Considering the material on record, the Court said that an ex-parte ad-interim injunction was in order against the alleged infringements.The Court rejected the submissions of social media intermediaries that the flagged content also contained parody and satire."Though the intermediaries may be right in some of such screenshots, however, the overwhelming numbers of screenshots placed on record, and perused by this Court do appear to be, to this Court, a prima facie, infringement of the personality/publicity rights of the plaintiff," it said.With respect to obscene content, Justice Gedela directed immediate takedown, observing that the videos were clearly vulgar and violated Kapoor's personality rights. "Clearly, those defendants who have employed AI tools to create videos containing sexually explicit and abhorrent content are demonstrably violating the personality/publicity rights of the plaintiff. In fact, such videos are vulgar and clearly would dent the image and the personality rights of the plaintiff, not only beyond measure, but presumably, irreparably too," the Court said..Justice Gedela stated that Kapoor has garnered an exclusive persona with his films, philanthropist activities and widespread visibility online and in print media."All these attributes individually or cumulatively are source identifiers of the plaintiff, and his personality/publicity rights. Any exploitation without permission or license of the plaintiff would demonstrably constitute infringement of plaintiff’s personality/publicity rights," the Court said. While ordering takedown of the content violating his rights, the Court also clarified that Kapoor can seek action against any newly discovered infringers too..The matter will be heard next on October 10. .Advocates Pravin Anand, Ameet Naik, Dhruv Anand, Madhu Gadodia, Dhananjay Khanna, Unnati Gambani, Nimrat Singh, Bhavya Verma and Aman Saraf appeared for Kapoor.Advocates Aditya Gupta and Rohit Venkatesan appeared for Google.Advocates Amee Rana, Vishesh Sharma and Anannya Gogoi appeared for Meta.Central government standing counsel Satya Ranjan Swain with government panel counsel Naveen appeared for Union of India.[Read Order]