Delhi High Court to pass order protecting Telugu actor Nagarjuna's personality rights

The Delhi High Court on Thursday said it will protect the personality rights of Telugu actor Akkineni Nagarjuna.

Justice Tejas Karia was dealing with a plea filed by Nagarjuna which raised concerns that the actor's personality rights were being violated through the unauthorised use of his image in content uploaded on social media, as well as in merchandise.

The judge said that an order can be passed to take down such content, once specific URLs are given to locate the same.

"The correct way is... you have identified the URLs. They (intermediaries) can be asked to take those links down. You have identified three categories. As of now you have identified 14 URLs," Justice Karia noted during today's hearing.

Representing Nagarjuna, advocate Pravin Anand, said that there were other URLs as well which used the actor's image without permission. However, they were not as egregious as the URLs already flagged, he said.

This prompted the Court to observe,

"That's the thing. These personalities have a very long life of fame. How long can these injunctions continue?"

The Court, however, eventually said that it would pass an order to ensure that Nagarjuna's personality rights are protected.

"Okay, we will pass an order," Justice Karia said.

Nagarjuna's suit before the Delhi High Court follows a long list of similar cases instituted by personalities such as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan, Amitabh Bachchan, Karan Johar, Anil Kapoor, and many others.

In each case, the High Court has passed injunction orders restraining the unauthorised use of the celebrities' personality rights.

Notably, in some cases, the images, voice or likeness of actors and actresses were also used for pornographic purposes. They were also ordered to be blocked.

Nagarjuna's counsel emphasised today that the actor has a considerable reputation. This 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, advocate Pravin Anand pointed out.

"He (Nagarjuna) has 95 films, two national awards. He is quite a reported person in the Telugu industry. He is called the celluloid scientist because of the versatile nature of his acting style ... He has over 6 million followers on Twitter. On Facebook, 8.1 million followers ... The first activity we are complaining about is pornographic content about him. The second activity is merchandising. The third activity is AI-generated content. These are YouTube shorts and there are videos. They are paid promotions. They have hashtags, Nagarjuna hashtags," Anand argued.

He 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) modes.

"The worst is that this video content can be used to train AI models according to the YouTube policy. They are actually helping in propagation of the illegal content," he said.

"That is true for all kinds of generative AI. Once it is part of larger internet, generative AI can use it.... Your argument is that because this is fake, generative AI can further use it ... AI is AI, it won't know what is genuine or not," the Court noted.

Nagarjuna was represented by Advocates Pravin Anand, Vaishali Mittal, Vibhav Mithal and Shivang of Anand and Anand.

[Live Coverage]