THE PERSONALITY RIGHTS SERIES: PART III

Drafting Credit: Divya Telang, Research Associate

Image credits: via Magnific (edited with Canva)

Protecting Ordinary Individuals: Can Copyright Law Fill the Gap?

Parts I and II of this series traced how personality rights grew out of privacy and publicity law in the US and Europe, and how Indian courts, largely through celebrity litigation have built a personality-rights doctrine without ever separating it from the right of publicity. That approach works reasonably well for film stars and cricketers who can prove commercial goodwill. It works far less well for everyone else. Imagine waking up to find a video of yourself online endorsing a product you’ve never heard of, or worse, your voice being used to scam your parents out of their savings.1

This part asks a narrower but more urgent question: what happens when an ordinary person’s face, voice or persona is used by AI, and can India’s Copyright Act, 1957 safeguard these rights?

1. Conflicting Precedents

Two cases dealt with posthumous personality rights. Although this is not the focus of this Part, the courts comments on personality rights are worth highlighting. The clearest judicial decision in favour of ordinary people came in Krishna Kishore Singh v. Sarla A. Saraogi, where the Delhi High Court while denying relief to Sushant Singh Rajput’s father went to court to stop filmmakers from making movies about his son’s life. The court rejected the idea that these rights are limited to celebrities only.2

On the contrary, in T-Series (Super Cassettes) v. Dreamline Reality,3 the Punjab and Haryana High Court took a different view. When Sukhwinder Singh, the husband of a real-life honour-killing victim whose story was being adapted into a film sought protection under his personality rights, the court held that such rights are specifically available to celebrities, and that the Supreme Court’s observations on personality rights in Puttaswamy were merely advisory and not binding.4

Until the Supreme Court resolves that conflict, a non-celebrity’s protection depends on which High Court an individual happens to be litigating in, which is hardly a stable foundation for a right as basic as control over one’s own face and voice.

2. Can the Copyright Act, 1957 Expand its Protection?

The Copyright Act, 1957 (“Act”) protects original literary, dramatic, musical, artistic works, cinematography and sound recordings,5 not people’s likeness, voice or image. A photograph is a copyrightable work, but the copyright belongs to the photographer, not to the person being photographed, unless there is a contract to the contrary.6 Further a person’s face itself has never been “authored” by anyone and so cannot be an original work in the statutory sense. When one’s persona happens to appear inside someone else’s protected work, they may be able to object to its unauthorised commercial exploitation, but only in that narrow circumstance, not as a general right over their own likeness.

Meaning, voice with speech can be protected as a copyrighted work in the form of a sound recording, musical work or as a part of a cinematograph film. But in that scenario, only that exact speech consisting of those particular words are protected, not the underlying voice. When Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) ‘generates’ voices identical to those in protected works but consisting of different content/words, it does not breach copyright.  For example, Amrish Puri saying “Jaa Simran, jaa. Jeele apni zindagi” is protected as a cinematographic work, but his AI generated voice saying “delulu is the solulu” is not.

The Act under Sections 38 and 38A, gives performers, that is, actors, singers, musicians, an exclusive right over their live performances, including the right to object to unauthorised recording, reproduction or broadcast, for fifty years. But it only ever protects a performance, it does nothing for the ordinary, non-performing citizen whose face is lifted for a scam advertisement or whose voice is cloned for a fraud call.7

That gap is precisely what Denmark and the United States have each tried to close, in very different ways.

3. Denmark’s Copyright Amendment Bill: Copyrighting the Human Face

In June 2025, Denmark’s Ministry of Culture proposed amending its Copyright legislation to treat a person’s own physical characteristics as protected subject matter.8 The proposed Section 73a would prohibit realistic, digitally generated imitations of a person’s physical characteristics from being made available to the public without consent, running for fifty years after the person’s death.9 Exceptions are carved out for caricature, satire, parody and genuine social criticism, unless the imitation amounts to misinformation causing serious harm.10 Section 65a will give performers equivalent protection over AI-imitated performances.11 Crucially, the right is not limited to celebrities, it applies to “all natural persons, including foreign nationals”.12

By routing the protection through copyright, Denmark will have an enforcement system that already works with regards to takedown notices, damages without proof of actual harm, and platform liability under the EU’s Digital Services Act, 2022, rather than building an entirely new regulator from scratch. However, copyright law is built to protect artistic creations, not a person’s physical body. If copyright is used to shield someone’s identity, the risk is treating a person’s likeness as a commercial product to be sold, assigned, transferred, or inherited, turning a violation of human dignity into a commercial argument. Critics argue a copyright frame is simply the wrong route for that kind of injury, even if it is procedurally convenient and a remedy under personality rights is better suited.13

4. America’s Answer: A New Federal Property Right

The United States has taken a different path. Rather than stretching copyright, the NO FAKES Act of 2026, creates an entirely new federal intellectual property right in every individual’s voice and visual likeness, available to a celebrity or a private citizen. The right is licensable but not assignable during a person’s lifetime, survives death for a further ten years (renewable), and comes with a DMCA-style notice-and-takedown process, including a counter-notification mechanism for anyone who believes their content was wrongly removed.14 However the Bill is yet to be passed by the U.S. Senate and House.15

Unlike Denmark’s model, it deliberately pre-empts future state right-of-publicity statutes on digital replicas, while preserving state laws already existing so that uniformity is maintained nationwide.

5. The Indian Scenario

Thought there are valid ethical and legal concerns, one cannot deny that AI models are great tools that can be utilised for creative exploitation and extending human abilities. It can be used as a tool for similar to autotune or mixing, video generation, educational purposes, reduce procedural workload, and so on. Regulation and redressal mechanisms are essential to ensure that new technologies are effectively utilised while minimizing its dangers as much as possible.16 It is essential for all stakeholders to collaboratively contemplate how to tackle these issues.

People should have the option to refuse having their persona serve as data sets for generating output for personal gain. Development of counter technologies which can detect AI generated may assist in curbing misuse, but it is a cure rather than a prevention. India currently has neither model. It has no Danish-style Section 73a or a sui generis federal right of the kind the US is close to enacting.

Amending our Act along Danish lines is a possibility. It is administratively fast, since it borrows an enforcement system that already exists, but it inherits the same objections critics have raised. Building a standalone sui generis statute closer to the NO FAKES Act is conceptually cleaner, since it treats identity theft as identity theft rather than as copyright infringement. But it is slower, since it requires new legislation, the implementation of which will take time and lengthy deliberations.

India currently relies on a fragmented patchwork of privacy laws, penal codes, and Information Technology laws which often leaves ordinary citizens vulnerable to systemic exploitation due to inconsistent enforcement and high costs. Regardless of what approach is adopted, the important point is efficient redressal. Giving people without the resources to litigate for years, a mechanism to redress their grievance quickly.

Furthermore, Intellectual Property laws shouldn’t just exist to protect corporate balance sheets or multi-million-dollar celebrity contracts. In the age of generative AI, your voice and your face are your ultimate creative assets. Adopting a balanced approach to protect the ordinary citizen, India can ensure that technology empowers human creativity rather than commodify human dignity.

  1. Clare Duffy, AI ‘voice cloning’ scams are on the rise. Here’s how to protect yourself, CNN (May 29, 2026), https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/29/tech/ai-voice-cloning-scams-protect-yourself; Ankita Deshkar, AI scams surge in India: Voice cloning, deepfakes and OTP frauds leave victims helpless, Indian Express (Sept. 7, 2025), https://indianexpress.com/article/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-scams-surge-in-india-voice-cloning-deepfakes-and-otp-frauds-leave-victims-helpless-10232064/. ↩︎
  2. Krishna Kishore Singh v. Sarla A. Saraogi & Ors., CS(COMM) 187/2021, I.A. 10551/2021 & I.A. 14436/2021. ↩︎
  3. T-Series v. Dreamline Reality Movies, Mohali, 2024 SCC OnLine P&H 661. Also see, Soham Lambe, Are Personality Rights only for Celebrities, Khurana & Khurana (Oct. 23, 2024), https://www.khuranaandkhurana.com/2024/10/23/are-personality-rights-only-for-celebrities. ↩︎
  4. Akshat Agarwal and Aditya Bhargava, Whose Personality is it Anyway?, IJLT Blog (April 16, 2024), https://forum.nls.ac.in/ijlt-blog-post/whose-personality-is-it-anyway/. ↩︎
  5. Section 2(y), Copyright Act, 1957. ↩︎
  6. Section 17(b), Copyright Act, 1957. ↩︎
  7. Supra note 1. ↩︎
  8. Miranda Bryant, Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features, The Guardian (June 27, 2025), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/27/deepfakes-denmark-copyright-law-artificial-intelligence. ↩︎
  9. Section 73a, Draft act amending the Copyright Act (Introduction of performance protection and protection against digitally generated imitations, etc.), 2025/0654/DK, https://technical-regulation-information-system.ec.europa.eu/en/notification/27420. (soft copy of the draft Act: https://technical-regulation-information-system.ec.europa.eu/en/notification/27420/text/D/EN) ↩︎
  10. Id. ↩︎
  11. Id. at Section 65a. ↩︎
  12. Id. at Section 86a. ↩︎
  13. Giovana Fleck, Denmark Leads EU Push to Copyright Faces in Fight Against Deepfakes, Tech Policy Press (Oct. 7, 2025) https://www.techpolicy.press/denmark-leads-eu-push-to-copyright-faces-in-fight-against-deepfakes/. ↩︎
  14. Kirsten Donaldson, Senate Committee Advances Bill to Protect Name, Image, Likeness and Voice Against Unauthorized AI Use, Holland & Knight (June 22, 2026), https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2026/06/senate-judiciary-committee-advances-legislation-to-protect-name. ↩︎
  15. See, NO FAKES Act of 2026, S. 4591, 119th Cong. (2026), https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/4591/text. ↩︎
  16. For example, the AI generated song Heart on my sleeve is a great example of creativity. However, one must ensure that due permission is taken before another’s voice, skill or likeness is used for profit. See, Rachel Reed, AI created a song mimicking the work of Drake and The Weeknd. What does that mean for copyright law? Harvard Law Today (May 2, 2023), https://hls.harvard.edu/today/ai-created-a-song-mimicking-the-work-of-drake-and-the-weeknd-what-does-that-mean-for-copyright-law/. ↩︎

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