Personality Rights Enforcement Against AI Deepfakes in 2026: Is Indian Law Ready for the Digital Doppelgänger Era?

Introduction : The creation of pictures, videos, and music has been altered by generative AI. A person's face may be convincingly superimposed on another's body, a voice can be copied from a brief recording, and a synthetic video can show a public figure promoting a product or making a political statement that they never authorized or uttered in 2026.

These technologies are suitable for use in creative expression, dvertising, movies, and accessibility. Nevertheless, they have also made it possible to conduct fake celebrity endorsements, election misinformation, brand impersonation, social-media scams, non-consensual sexual images, and fraudulent voice calls. Without actually seeing, recording, or meeting someone, their identity's commercial worth may now be stolen. Does Indian law provide enough protection against digital clones generated by AI is the main legal question that this brings up.

This raises a central legal question: Does Indian law adequately protect an individual against an AI-generated digital replica?

The answer is complicated. Indian courts have increasingly protected a person’s name, image, voice, mannerisms and other identifying attributes through privacy, publicity, passing off and constitutional principles. Yet India has no comprehensive statute specifically regulating personality rights or unauthorised digital replicas. Victims must therefore combine remedies under several different legal regimes, each designed for a different type of harm.

India’s Legal Framework

Rights to one's personality and public exposure

Principally through common law, especially the law of privacy, passing off, and commercial misappropriation, Indian personality rights evolved. In general, the right of publicity relates to a person's ability to control the use of their identity for commercial gain. It is particularly crucial for celebrities since their names, voices, photos, and unique routines have their own financial worth.

In the matter of ICC Development (International) Ltd. v. Arvee Enterprises, the Delhi High Court declared that publicity was a right related to an individual's identity and personality. The Court also stressed that publicity rights belong to the person and are not automatically transferred to an event organizer or commercial entity. Prior verdicts like Baby Gift House v. Ramkumar Jewellers considered unauthorized commercial relationships with D.M. Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. v. Titan Industries Ltd. a h celebrities to be actionable if they misled consumers or capitalized on the celebrities' good name.

The remedy of passing off is still essential. A celebrity or other claimant could contend that a deepfake implies approval, association, or endorsement where there isn't one. An advertisement that is faked and features someone endorsing an item without authorization might conceivably meet the criteria for the typical components of goodwill, misrepresentation, and damage.

Personality and publicity rights

The problem is that even if a work hasn't been sold by its creator, personality rights may still infringe on their dignity, autonomy, or privacy if they are restricted to their commercial reputation.

Safeguarding constitutional rights Personal liberty and life are safeguarded by Article 21 of the Constitution. Privacy is considered a constitutionally protected right that includes informational privacy, decisional autonomy, bodily integrity, identity, and dignity, as established in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India.

These interests are directly affected by AI cloning. When a synthetic replica is circulated as real, a person loses control over how their face, body, or voice is depicted. Economic damage is not the only thing that happens. An unwilling subject may be accused of criminal behavior, political opinions, sexual activity, or commercial declarations in a fabricated video. Legislation governing intellectual property rights.

Copyright law

Copyright defends expression, not identity itself. The Copyright Act, 1957, may safeguard a film, sound recording, musical composition, recorded performance, or photograph. Exclusive rights and initial ownership are covered in Sections 14 and 17, while performers may be protected under Sections 38 and 38A. The provisions for moral rights are only one of several copyright rules that are applied to performers under Section 39A. Under Section 57, authors' unique privileges are safeguarded, such as the ability to avoid having their works distorted or mutilated in ways that could damage their honor or standing.Therefore, the copyright owner may have a claim if someone's recorded interview, film footage, or photograph is copied to make a deepfake. Not necessarily the person shown or heard, but rather the production company, record label, employer, or even the photographer, may be the owner.

The DPDP Act, 2023

The Digital Personal Data Protection Act of 2023 controls how digital personal data is handled and aims to shield people while allowing for legal data use. Normally, a recognizable face, voice recording, or video will be considered personal data if it pertains to an identifiable person.A legal basis for processing, notice, and, in several situations, consent are all requirements of the Act. It also gives data principals rights like grievance resolution, erasure, correction, and access. However, the legislation does not establish a distinct property right to an individual's image or voice.It's especially important how the Act handles publicly accessible information. For processing publicly accessible personal data, Section 17(2) grants an exception from some duties. This might make claims about AI systems that have been taught on films or images that have been willingly published online more difficult. .The DPDP framework might be more helpful when an AI provider gathers, keeps, or processes recognizable facial or vocal data for generation, profiling, or training. Nevertheless, it is still mostly a data-governance regulation rather than an overarching statute governing digital identity or publicity..

The Information Technology Act and platform rules

Depending on the conduct involved, the Information Technology Act, 2000 may apply. Section 66C deals with identity theft, Section 66D addresses cheating by personation through a computer resource, and Section 67 may be used in certain situations for material that is obscene or sexually explicit. Section 69A provides a blockage procedure, while Section 79 provides conditional safe-harbour protection for intermediaries.

The Enforcement Challenge

Who owns a digital face?

A face is not a standard work that is copyrighted under the law. It also fails to recognize that a person's whole self is their property to be owned. The facial image, a voice, gestures, catchphrases, apparel, character traits and a well-known performance are just a few of the elements that can be used to build a digital duplicate.

The ruling by the Delhi High Court in Simply Life India v. Anil Kapoor was significant since it safeguarded a number of the actor's characteristics, such as his name, image, voice, speaking style, dialogue delivery, and distinguishing characteristics.

These obligations are important since they go beyond a reactive notice-and-takedown paradigm. Nevertheless, their effectiveness will depend on detection technology, platform responsiveness, jurisdictional cooperation, and an individual's capacity to recognize the right intermediary or inventor.

Cross-border jurisdiction

The issue of 'deep fake' technology is in essence an international question. An AI model could be developed in the United States, and the data used to train them could come from India, the content created on a server could be in Singapore, and the person affected could live in Delhi. Thereafter, such content is able to be displayed and disseminated through platforms that are deployed in different jurisdictions.

Indian courts may have jurisdiction when the harm occurs in India, such as if the content is available to Indian viewers and for Indian consumers. To obtain adequate legal relief from a foreign defendant, however, additional requirements may be required, such as service of process in a foreign jurisdiction, analysis of conflicting laws, and recognition or enforcement of foreign legal orders.

Platform liability and safe harbor

Not every deepfake content that is posted on Instagram, YouTube, or X is created by the platform itself. There is some protection for intermediaries who provide a service in compliance with statutory criteria and exercise due diligence. However, this safe harbour clause is not the end of the world.

Things get more complicated if a platform encourages, profits from, or algorithmically amplifies the challenged content, or if it is given specific and sufficiently legal notice without taking appropriate steps. The new regulations on synthetic-information, which are coming into effect in 2026, might create more practical obligations for platforms, particularly when they help to generate or spread synthetic media.

Speed of harm

A deepfake has a chance of going viral in a matter of hours, and civil suits can take years to be decided. If the deepfaked video has already hurt the individual's reputation, caused an election controversy, or resulted in financial fraud, a final judgment for damages won't be of much value.

Judicial Developments and Comparative Law.

The Indian courts have gradually developed a protective legality, that is clear from the various rulings to date like Puttaswamy, ICC Development, D. M. Entertainment, Titan Industries, Amitabh Bachchan v. Rajat Nagi, Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India, the Jackie Shroff proceedings and the Arijit Singh litigation. The controversies regarding Yash Raj Films also come into picture as they pertain to the unauthorized use of protected voice, image, performance, or audiovisual content and overlap with copyright and personality rights.

In the rest of the world, alternative legal solutions have been demonstrated. The U. S. court has awarded damages to the imitator of a famous singer's distinctive voice in an ad in Midler v. Ford Motor Co. In the case of White v. Samsung Electronics, a robot that was supposed to look like Vanna White was deemed to be a possible misappropriation of identity. While the case Hart v. Electronic Arts focused on the use of a college athlete's likeness in a video game, No Doubt v. Activision was about consent and contractual licensing in video games.

In the United Kingdom, there is no single right of personality.In contrast to India, there is no consolidated and independent right of personality in the United Kingdom. Rather, plaintiffs bring claims related to privacy, passing-off, breach of confidentiality, data protection, copyright and other causes of action. This reflects India's fragmented legal field, though the well-founded legal principles in the UK in relation to privacy and passing off may offer alternative remedies in certain cases.

Conclusion

AI has greatly revolutionized the economics of identity. The laws of the land were meant to cover photographs, ads, people impersonating themselves and regular recordings; they were not intended for synthetic digital people that can sound like a real voice, move like a real person and endorse products in an eerily realistic way.

Indian courts have been as innovative as ever. They have utilized principles of privacy, dignity, publicity, passing off, and copyright to safeguard various aspects of an individual's identity. The Indian legal system has the capacity to address problems of voice cloning, digital avatars and illegal commercial connections, as seen in the cases of Amitabh Bachchan, Anil Kapoor, Arijit Singh and Jackie Shroff.

Yet the courts' protection is still fragmented and sometimes inadequate and late. India needs a comprehensive law that merges personality rights, privacy rights, copyright laws, consumer laws, criminal laws, and accountability of platforms. If these changes are not made, it will be easier to make a duplicate of the digital identity than to manage its use, until it is misused.

Author: Charvi Jaiswal in case of any queries please contact/write back to us via email to content@khuranaandkhurana.com or at  Khurana & Khurana, Advocates and IP Attorney.