Delhi High Court: In an application filed under Order 39 Rules 1 and 2 of the Civil Procedure Code, 1908 (‘CPC’), wherein the plaintiff, Aishwarya Rai, sought a permanent injunction restraining Defendants 1 to 9 from infringement of copyright, performer’s rights, misappropriation of Personality Rights and passing off, the Single Judge Bench of Tejas Karia, J, held that the unauthorised use of Aishwarya Rai’s persona constituted an infringement of her Personality Rights. Thus, the Court granted interim injunction in favour of Aishwarya Rai and directed blocking and disabling of all infringing websites, platforms and YouTube channels disseminating content that violates her Personality Rights.
Background
Aishwarya Rai is an internationally recognized personality, an acclaimed actress and a global ambassador for various brands. She has earned immense fame and respect for her prolific acting career, philanthropic endeavours, and global representation of Indian culture and cinema.
On account of her reputation, Aishwarya Rai’s name, image, signature, voice, likeness and all other elements of persona, constituting her Personality Rights, have acquired a unique distinctiveness, and due to their inimitable nature, they have a huge commercial value associated with them.
Defendant 1 maintains and operates the website ‘aishwaryawold.com’, which is designed to mislead the public by falsely representing itself as Aishwarya Rai’s official website.
Defendants 3, 4 and 5 operate and own websites and e-commerce platforms that unauthorizedly sells t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters and other articles bearing her photographs which violate her personality rights.
Defendant 6 is an organization named ‘Aishwarya Nation Wealth, Motivational Speaker’, which is using Aishwarya Rai’s name and image in an unauthorized manner, including willfully misrepresenting her as the organization’s Chairperson.
Defendant 7 is a chatbot wherein users can interact with AI characters that are designed to facilitate and engage in personalized conversations with inappropriate innuendos related to Aishwarya Rai. The said chatbot also engages in her impersonation while using sexually-coloured remarks in its messages generated in chat with the users of the chatbot.
Defendant 8 and 9 are YouTube Channels which feature AI-generated, deepfake videos of Aishwarya Rai in false settings and inappropriate scenarios with other celebrities, which is bound to mislead the public into believing that the depiction in the videos is factually true bringing her ill-repute.
It was submitted that the entire business model of Defendants 1 to 9 was designed to illegally monetise Aishwarya Rai’s persona for personal gain. The infringing activities conducted by Defendants 1 to 9 is without her consent and is debasing the goodwill and reputation she has carefully garnered over the many years.
Analysis, Law and Decision
The Court stated that Personality Rights entail the right to control and protect the exploitation of one’s image, name, likeness or other attributes of the individuals’ personality, in addition to the commercial gains that can be derived from the same. It is rooted in the individual’s autonomy to permit or deny the exploitation of the likeness of other attributes of their personality. The unauthorized exploitation of the attributes of an individual’s personality may have two facets: firstly, violation of their right to protect their personality attributes from being commercially exploited; and secondly, violation of their right to privacy, which in turn leads to undermining their right to live with dignity.
The Court observed that the infringing activities by Defendants 1 to 9 amounted to infringement of Aishwarya Rai’s Personality Rights which has caused incalculable loss to her goodwill and reputation.
The Court also referred to cases of Amitabh Bachchan v. Rajat Negi, (2022) 6 HCC (Del) 641, and Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India, 2023 SCC OnLine Del 6914, wherein the Delhi High Court had protected the Personality Rights of other prominent actors.
The Court opined that the misuse of Aishwarya Rai’s name, image, likeness and other elements of her persona clearly constituted infringement as the adoption of the aforementioned attributes without any authorization, would inevitably cause confusion and create a perception of endorsement by her. Thus, the Court held that a prima facie case had been established and the balance of convenience was also in Aishwarya Rai’s favour. Further, irreparable loss, damage and injury would be caused to her goodwill, reputation and prestige if the interim injunction was not granted immediately.
Till the next date of hearing, the Court restrained:
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Defendants 1 to 9 and any persons acting on their behalf from violating Aishwarys Rai’s Personality/Publicity/Moral Rights by utilizing directly or indirectly, her name, the acronym ‘ARB’, her image, her likeness or any other attributes of her persona which are exclusively identifiable with her, for any commercial or personal gain.
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Defendants 3 to 9 and any persons acting on their behalf, from creating, sharing, disseminating, any product, including T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and/or audio-visual content, created through Artificial Intelligence, that results in dilution of Aishwarya Rai’s persona.
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Defendant 5, an e-commerce platform, to take down, remove, disable and block the URLs selling infringing products on the platform within 72 hours of receipt of notice.
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Defendant 10, Google LLC that owns the tool ‘YouTube’, to take down the channels posting deepfake videos of Aishwarya Rai within 7 days of receipt of notice.
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Defendants11 and 12, i.e., the Ministry of Electronics and Information and Technology and the Department of Technology, Government of India, to issue necessary directions to block and disable all URLs posting infringing content or selling infringing merchandise within 7 days of receipt of notice.
The matter was further listed for 15-1-2026.
[Aishwarya Rai Bachchan v. Aishwaryaworld.com, C.S.(COMM) No. 956 of 2025, decided on 9-9-2025]
Advocates who appeared in this case:
For the Plaintiff: Sandeep Sethi, Senior Advocate, Pravin Anand, Ameet Naik, Madhu Gadodia, Dhruv Anand, Udita Patro, Nimrat Singh, Deevesha Tudekar, Dhananjay Khanna, Aayushi Udani, Riya Kumar, Advocates
For the Defendants: Mamta Rani Jha, Rohan Ahuja, Shruttima Ehersa, Devangini Rai, Aiswarya Debadarsini, Diya, Jahanvi, Advocates
