Delhi High Court passes interim order to protect AP Deputy CM Pawan Kalyan's personality rights

The Delhi High Court has passed an interim order to protect the personality rights of Andhra Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister and actor Pawan Kalyan [Mr Konidala Pawan Kalyan Vs Ashok Kumar John Doe & Ors.].

Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora has restrained various websites from engaging in the unauthorised exploitation of Kalyan's personality rights or selling merchandise with his image without permission.

"Such unauthorised use of the Plaintiff’s attributes by these infringing Defendants, prima facie, amounts to violation of the Plaintiff’s personality rights," the Court stated.

The Court made it clear that Pawan Kalyan's name, image, likeness, or voice, cannot be unauthorisedly exploited for commercial gain by the defendants through the use of any technology, including but not limited to Artificial Intelligence, deepfakes, morphing, or digital editing.

The Court also addressed the alleged infringement of Kalyan's personality rights by fan accounts on social media. The Court has directed such social media users to add a disclaimer that the content is being posted by a fan account.

"This Court is of the considered opinion that subject to the account owner(s) specifically including a disclaimer on the profile description that it is a ‘fan account’, no further action of take down is required against the said accounts," the Court said.

The Court further directed Meta (which owns Facebook and Instagram) to communicate this interim order to the concerned users operating the fan accounts. It added that Meta shall render the fan accounts "inactive" until the directions to add a disclaimer have been carried out.

The Court has directed Meta and Google to furnish basic subscriber information (BSI) details of such users as well within three weeks.

The matter will be heard next on May 12.

Kalyan had sued various social media intermediaries, e-commerce platforms and others for violating his personality rights. He alleged that several entities on social media platforms and e-commerce sites were using elements of his persona for commercial gains without authorisation. He stated that the websites were impersonating him through AI-generated voice replication and deepfakes for entering into commercial engagements.

He argued that there were also websites selling merchandise containing elements of his personality on t-shirts, mugs, key chains, wallpapers, stickers and other articles.

Senior Advocate J Sai Deepak appeared for Kalyan. He contended that, as per the High Court's orders in a similar case concerning Bollywood actor Ajay Devgan, Kalyan's lawyers had first approached the internet intermediaries concerned for relief.

However, Kalyan got no satisfactory response from these intermediaries, and many materials that violated his personality rights continued to remain online, his counsel told the High Court.

In an earlier hearing, the Court ordered Meta, Google and X to act on Kalyan's complaint regarding internet entities that were violating his personality rights.

Along with Senior Advocate Sai Deepak, advocates Himanshu Deora, Rahul Mehta, Arpit Choudhary, Sukrit Kapoor, Krunal Mehta, Anupriya Alok, Sambhavi Sharma, Sanat Saswadkar, Sambhavi Bhardwaj and Karen Koya of King Stubb & Kasiva represented Pawan Kalyan.

[Read Order]