From Billboards to Deepfakes: How Courts Are Handling the Crisis of Digital Likeness

Personality Rights and Digital Likeness Enforcement is the legal battleground where individuals, primarily public figures, actors, athletes, and popular creators, protect their name, image, voice, signature, and overall persona from being exploited, cloned, or faked online without their permission. It is quite popular, and the concept has become increasingly urgent recently due to rapid advancements in generative AI.[1] Here is what it actually covers and why it is such a massive legal trend:

1. Personality Rights

Personality rights generally split into two main components:

• The Right of Publicity: The commercial aspect. It ensures that nobody can use your face, voice, or name to sell products, run fake advertisements, or profit from your reputation without paying you or obtaining your consent.
  

• The Right to Privacy / Dignity: The personal aspect. It protects you from having your identity dragged through the mud, distorted, or subjected to deepfakes that compromise your personal autonomy or reputation.
  

2. Digital Likeness Enforcement

Before the AI boom, violating someone's personality rights usually meant a company unauthorizedly using an actor's image on a billboard or on packaging. Today, Digital Likeness Enforcement is driven by high-tech threats:

• Deepfakes & Voice Cloning: Anyone can use cheap AI tools to clone a celebrity's voice to shill crypto scams, generate fake video endorsements, or create explicit, vulgar, or malicious fake imagery.
  

• AI Chatbots and Replicas: Unauthorised AI chatbots trained on a public figure's likeness, conversational style, or persona to interact with users commercially.
  

• Meme and Sticker Monetisation: Unlicensed digital goods (like viral Telegram stickers or merchandise templates) that leverage a creator’s face or catchphrases for traffic and profit.

3. Manner of Handling by Courts

Because tech is evolving faster than actual legislation, courts, particularly in places like the Delhi High Court and Bombay High Court in India, which have become global hotspots for this, are aggressively stepping in to issue "John Doe" orders and emergency takedowns, forcing tech platforms, AI companies, and internet service providers to wipe deepfakes and unauthorised merchandise instantly.[2]

However, courts are also drawing a firm line to prevent abuse: Personality rights cannot be used to kill free speech. Judges have explicitly ruled that public figures cannot weaponise these laws to suppress legitimate parody, satire, caricature, or public criticism, unless there is actual malicious commercial exploitation or deceptive fraud involved.

References :

[1] Chopra, P., Sony, R. & Chopra, S. (2025). Generative AI, Copyright and Personality Rights: A Comparative Legal Perspective. Legal Issues in the Digital Age 6, pp. 23-51. https://doi.org/10.17323/2713-2749.2025.3.23.51 [2] Arunima. (May 29, 2025). Delhi HC grants ‘John Doe’ injunction to Ankur Warikoo against AI & Deepfake misuse of identity and brand ‘Warikoo’. SCC Times. https://www.scconline.com/blog/post/2025/05/29/delhi-high-court-ankur-warikoo-john-doe-injunction-deepfake-ai-misuse-legal-news/