Cloning the Persona: Personality and Publicity Rights in the Age of AI Deepfakes and Voice Cloning in India

Abstract

The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence has made it possible to clone a person's face, voice, and mannerisms with unprecedented fidelity, and Indian courts have responded with a rapidly expanding body of personality and publicity rights jurisprudence. This paper examines that development. India has no dedicated statute protecting personality or publicity rights; the protection that exists has been assembled by the courts from the constitutional right to privacy and dignity recognised in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), from the common law of passing off and defamation, and from scattered provisions of the Copyright Act, 1957, and the Trade Marks Act, 1999. Through a line of decisions running from Amitabh Bachchan v. Rajat Nagi (2022) and Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India (2023) to Jackie Shroff v. The Peppy Store (2024) and Arijit Singh v. Codible Ventures (2024), the Delhi and Bombay High Courts have extended protection from name and image to voice, vocal style, mannerisms, catchphrases, and AI-generated replicas. The paper argues that, while this judicial response has been swift and remedially robust, the absence of a statutory foundation produces uncertainty over the scope of protected attributes, the treatment of ordinary citizens as opposed to celebrities, the duration of rights after death, and, above all, the boundary between protection and the freedom of expression guaranteed by Article 19(1)(a). It proposes a statutory framework that codifies the protected persona, establishes a consent-and-licensing regime, expressly carves out satire, parody, news, and artistic use, and integrates personality-rights remedies with the synthetic-media labelling regime introduced in 2026.