Personality rights in the digital age: Delhi High Court protects Varun Dhawan against AI-generated misuse

The Indian doctrinal landscape on personality rights had, until the past few years, been somewhat under-developed. The substantive recognition that an individual has constitutionally and statutorily protected interests in the commercial exploitation of their identity had been articulated in earlier dispositions — including the Auto Shankar case on the right to privacy in autobiography, and various High Court engagements with the use of celebrity images in advertising. But the doctrinal framework had been developed in pieces, without a comprehensive architecture.

The contemporary developments — driven substantially by the digital age's capacity to produce identity-misappropriating content — have produced a more coherent doctrinal architecture. The Delhi High Court has, across 2024–2026, been the principal forum for the doctrinal development. The Varun Dhawan disposition, indicated by Justice Jyoti Singh in late May 2026, is part of the developing line.

The Varun Dhawan disposition

The substantive dispute before the Delhi High Court engaged a familiar contemporary pattern. The actor — Varun Dhawan — had sought relief against a combination of identified and unidentified entities that were exploiting his identity in various forms. The substantive grievance categories included:

• Unauthorised merchandise — products bearing the actor's name, image or likeness, marketed without consent or licensing.
• AI-generated content — material produced through generative AI systems that used the actor's identity attributes, often in ways that the actor had not authorised and that misrepresented the actor's positions or activities.
• Deepfakes — manipulated video and audio content placing the actor in scenarios he had not been in.
• Pornographic content — content using the actor's likeness in sexually explicit material.
• Morphed images — manipulated images using the actor's identity attributes for various purposes.

Justice Jyoti Singh indicated that the court would pass an interim order protecting the actor's personality rights — including directions for the takedown of infringing links and content.

The disposition operates within the developing 2026 Delhi High Court framework. Recent dispositions in respect of Hrithik Roshan, Ajay Devgn and others have addressed similar substantive grievances and have produced a body of operational doctrine.

The doctrinal architecture

The Delhi High Court's developing framework has three connected doctrinal elements.

The constitutional foundation

The first element is the constitutional foundation. Personality rights, in the developing Indian doctrine, are anchored in the constitutional protection of Article 21 — particularly the post-Puttaswamy (2017) framework on privacy, dignity and identity.

The substantive premise is that the constitutional protection of identity — articulated comprehensively in Puttaswamy — supports an individual's interest in controlling the commercial and reputational use of their identity attributes. Personality rights, on this reading, are the operationalisation of the constitutional protection in the commercial-exploitation context.

The constitutional foundation produces several substantive consequences:

• The protection extends to non-commercial misuse — including reputational damage, defamation through identity manipulation, and dignity-affecting content. Personality rights are not narrowly confined to commercial-exploitation grievances.
• The framework engages remedies under Article 226 — High Court writ jurisdiction is available where the misuse engages State or quasi-State actors, or where the substantive protection requires structural remedies.
• The framework operates against private actors — through the horizontal-application doctrine that has been developing in post-Puttaswamy privacy jurisprudence.

The statutory dimensions

The second element is the statutory architecture that supports the constitutional protection. Multiple statutes engage aspects of the framework:

• Copyright Act, 1957 — where the misuse involves copyrighted material featuring the personality. The Act's framework protects the underlying creative work; the personality rights operate in parallel.
• Trade Marks Act, 1999 — where the personality's name, image or distinctive attributes have been registered as trademarks. The Act's framework provides the standard intellectual-property remedies.
• Information Technology Act, 2000 — particularly the framework for intermediary liability and the procedural architecture for takedown of infringing content.
• Sectoral frameworks — including those governing advertising standards, consumer protection, and various other domains.

The statutory framework supplements the constitutional protection; both operate together to produce the operational architecture for personality-rights protection.

The injunctive architecture

The third element is the procedural architecture for relief. Personality-rights litigation typically engages:

• Interim injunctions — to prevent ongoing misuse pending substantive determination. The framework's strength in the contemporary digital context depends substantially on the rapid availability of interim relief.
• Takedown orders — directions to specific platforms, websites, or content hosts to remove identified infringing content. The orders typically require the defendants and any intermediaries to take down the content within specified time limits.
• John Doe orders — orders directed at unidentified defendants, often necessary in the digital context where the original source of misuse cannot be readily identified.
• Permanent injunctions and damages — at the substantive disposition stage, where appropriate.

The framework's effectiveness depends substantially on the responsive procedural architecture. The Delhi High Court's developing practice has been to provide rapid interim relief, often within days of filing.

The AI dimension

The contemporary doctrinal engagement substantially turns on the AI dimension — the capacity of generative AI systems to produce identity-misappropriating content at scale.

The substantive challenges

The AI dimension raises substantive challenges that the pre-AI personality-rights framework had not contemplated:

• Voice cloning — AI systems can replicate an individual's voice with substantial fidelity from limited training material. The misuse of voice clones in advertising, fraudulent calls and other contexts produces a category of harm the framework now addresses.
• Image and video manipulation — Deepfake technology can produce convincing video material placing the individual in scenarios that did not occur. The harm extends to reputation, dignity, and (in defamatory cases) potential criminal exposure.
• Identity-attribute generation — AI systems can generate material that, while not directly using existing imagery, replicates the individual's distinctive attributes in new contexts.
• Scale — AI systems enable identity misappropriation at scale that pre-AI frameworks had not anticipated. A single individual's identity can be misused in thousands of pieces of content.

The framework's response

The Delhi High Court's developing framework engages the AI dimension through several substantive moves:

• Broad framing of the protection — extending personality rights to cover not just direct identity-misuse (using existing images, names, voices) but also AI-generated identity-replication.
• Intermediary-engagement architecture — directions to platforms, social-media services, and other intermediaries to engage their content-moderation infrastructure to address AI-generated identity-misuse.
• Substantive standards for relief — articulating what counts as substantively actionable misuse, particularly in the AI context where the distinction between genuine and synthetic content can be operationally difficult.

The Delhi High Court has, in parallel with the expansion of the framework's reach, also cautioned against over-expansive interpretation of personality rights. The substantive concern is that an unbounded reading would constrain legitimate creative engagement with public figures, satire, commentary, and other forms of expression that the constitutional framework also protects. The doctrinal architecture, accordingly, is being calibrated to address the AI-age harms while preserving space for legitimate expressive activity.

The constitutional protection of identity under the post-Puttaswamy framework supports the protection of personality rights against unauthorised commercial and reputational use — including the AI-generated misuse that the contemporary digital context produces. The framework must, however, be calibrated to preserve space for legitimate creative and expressive activity.

What the framework now looks like

For practitioners advising in personality-rights matters, the working framework has the following architecture.

For the personality / celebrity client

The client's substantive interests engage:

• The right to control commercial exploitation of name, image, likeness, voice and other distinctive identity attributes.
• The right against reputational misuse through identity manipulation — including the AI-generated content that the contemporary context produces.
• The right against dignity-affecting misuse — including pornographic and other indignity-engaging uses of identity attributes.
• The right to injunctive and damages relief through the procedural architecture of the High Court.

The client's strategic considerations include:

• Proactive licensing infrastructure for legitimate use of identity attributes.
• Monitoring infrastructure to identify misuse.
• Rapid-response procedural architecture for invoking the personality-rights framework.

For the platform / intermediary

The intermediary's substantive considerations engage:

• The intermediary-liability framework under the Information Technology Act.
• The content-moderation infrastructure to address takedown demands.
• The architecture for verifying takedown demands and ensuring legitimate use is not over-restricted.

For the creative or expressive client

The framework's calibration produces space for legitimate creative and expressive activity. The substantive defences engaged include:

• Public-figure commentary — engagement with the public-figure status of the personality in substantive commentary on their public activities.
• Satire and parody — defences that the constitutional framework has been developing in parallel.
• Fair-use and similar exceptions — where the substantive use engages the appropriate exception architecture.
• Free-expression defence — the broader Article 19(1)(a) framework, where the use engages substantive expressive activity.

The framework's strength depends on the substantive engagement with these defences. The mere claim of personality-rights infringement does not foreclose substantive expressive engagement with public figures.

What the framework does not address

It is worth being precise about the boundary.

• The framework addresses personality rights as a doctrinal category. It does not foreclose the broader frameworks — intellectual property, defamation, privacy — that operate in parallel and may also engage.
• The framework's application to cross-border misuse — where the misuse occurs in a foreign jurisdiction but affects a personality with substantial Indian presence — engages additional considerations including jurisdictional architecture.
• The framework does not foreclose legislative engagement with the personality-rights question. Various proposals for substantive legislation — including specific frameworks for AI-generated content, voice cloning, and similar substantive challenges — are at various stages of policy development.

Three lines of practitioner work

For practitioners engaged with personality rights, the contemporary framework supports three substantive lines of work.

Substantive client representation — representing personalities in litigation to protect against identified misuse. The framework supplies the doctrinal architecture; the procedural infrastructure supports rapid relief.

Strategic counsel for celebrities and other personalities — developing institutional architecture for licensing, monitoring and rapid response. The framework's effectiveness depends substantially on proactive engagement.

Compliance counsel for platforms and content businesses — engaging the intermediary-liability framework, the content-moderation infrastructure, and the takedown-response architecture. The framework's operationalisation produces substantial compliance work.

The bottom line

The Delhi High Court's Varun Dhawan disposition is part of a developing 2026 line of personality-rights jurisprudence that has substantively engaged the AI-age challenges to identity protection. The constitutional foundation under Puttaswamy, the statutory architecture across multiple frameworks, and the procedural infrastructure for rapid injunctive relief together produce a working architecture for personality-rights litigation. The High Court has, in parallel, cautioned against over-expansive interpretation — preserving space for legitimate creative and expressive activity. For practitioners across the personality-rights, intellectual-property, and digital-content domains, the framework is now sufficiently developed to support working practice. The doctrinal development continues; the contemporary engagement with the AI dimension is producing substantial doctrinal innovation.

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Verify against the operative orders. The Delhi High Court's developing line on personality rights produces frequent doctrinal refinements; the framework should be tracked across subsequent dispositions.