Delhi High Court protects actor Allu Arjun's personality rights

New Delhi: The Delhi High Court has protected the personality rights of Telugu actor Allu Arjun and restrained the unauthorised use of his name, voice and likeness by several entities for commercial use and impersonation.

In an interim order passed on April 17 on a lawsuit by the Pushpa star, Justice Tushar Rao Gedela said Arjun has a "stellar career" and that his highly popular dialogues and other distinctive attributes demonstrated his "iconic status".

It further said that unique and distinctive attributes, like name, appearance and voice, clearly constituted copyrights of the actor, over which he has exclusive rights of exploitation, and he would suffer an irreparable loss and injury if an interim relief was not granted.

The court also noted that Arjun has various trademark registrations of his name, abbreviations, etc.

"Defendant...are restrained from violating the plaintiff's personality/publicity rights by utilizing and/or in any manner directly and/or indirectly, using or exploiting or misappropriating the Plaintiffs (a) name "Allu Arjun"; (b) image and likeness; and (c) any other attributes of the plaintiff which are exclusively identifiable with him for any commercial and/or personal gain and/or otherwise by exploiting them in any manner whatsoever without the plaintiff's consent and/or authorization, through the use of any technology including but not limited to Artificial Intelligence, Generative Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deepfakes, Face Morphing and on any mediums and formats including but not limited to physical medium, the virtual medium such as websites, metaverse, social media, etc," the court ordered.

The court also directed social media platforms to take down certain infringing content.

Seeking the protection of Arjun's personality rights, senior counsel Swathi Sukumar had earlier submitted that his personality traits were being misappropriated for the sale of merchandise bearing his image and signature, operating voice-cloning platforms, AI chatbots and the generation of obscene content.

Several public figures, such as actors Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Abhishek Bachchan and Salman Khan, Art of Living founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, journalist Sudhir Chaudhary and podcaster Raj Shamani had earlier approached the high court seeking protection of their personality and publicity rights. The high court granted them interim relief.

Recently, the high court also protected the personality rights of cricketer Gautam Gambhir and actors Sonakshi Sinha and Vivek Oberoi by granting interim relief.