India has no single "personality rights" statute — but over the past decade, Indian courts have built a firm wall of precedent protecting a person's name, image, voice and distinctive mannerisms from unauthorised commercial use.
High-profile personalities from film and sport have won injunctions against everything from AI-generated deepfakes and voice clones to unauthorised merchandise, GIFs and domain names. Courts have grounded these wins in the right to privacy (recognised as a fundamental right in 2017), the tort of passing off, and copyright law.
What changed with generative AI
Earlier, misuse required effort — a lookalike, a studio, a printing press. Now a face-swap takes minutes and a convincing voice clone needs seconds of audio. The volume of infringement has outpaced the legal system's case-by-case machinery, and courts have started granting broader, technology-aware injunctions in response.
The DPDP layer
The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 adds a second front: your likeness and voice are personal data. Processing them — including to train or run an AI model — needs a lawful basis, and consent under DPDP must be specific, informed and withdrawable. Rights infrastructure that records exactly what you've consented to, for which use, for how long, stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the compliance backbone.
The takeaway: the law is increasingly on the side of the person whose face it is. But rights you haven't registered, priced and monitored are rights you'll only enforce after the damage is done. Register first. Enforce from a position of record.