Delhi High Court To Hear Vivek Oberoi, Janhvi Kapoor, Aaradhya Bachchan Personality Rights Suits Together

The Delhi High Court has decided to hear the personality rights suits filed by actors Vivek Oberoi, Janhvi Kapoor and Aaradhya Bachchan together, as they raise recurring questions on the scope and limits of personality rights.

Justice Anup Jairam Bhambhani said he would first hear these three matters as a batch and use the legal principles emerging from them to deal with the other pending personality rights suits separately.

The court is dealing with a growing number of such suits filed by film celebrities, influencers and other public figures, raising overlapping claims concerning the commercial use of a person's name, image, likeness and other aspects of their persona, as well as claims based on privacy, dignity and reputation.

In Kapoor's case, the court declined in August to pass a blanket injunction against nearly 6,884 URLs she had cited, observing that such broad relief could be misused and that "it is going out of hand."

It confined interim protection to obscene or pornographic content, content directly monetising her persona, and content using her name and likeness to sell merchandise. The larger questions, including the treatment of fan pages and the outer limits of the right, were left for fuller argument.

In Oberoi's case, the court had granted ad interim relief on February 5, restraining unauthorised use of his name, image, likeness and voice, including through AI-generated content.

With these questions recurring across suits, the court had appointed Advocate Gautam Bhatia as amicus curiae in Kapoor's suit on September 3. Advocate Pravin Anand appeared in the matter of Aaradhya Bachchan.

“See, the thing is, the more the number of matters, the more complicated the logistics of the hearing. So, I had taken up Vivek Oberoi, I had taken up Jhanvi Kapoor, I had taken up Aaradhya Bachchan, that was it,” the court remarked orally.

“So, why should I not only hear these three as a batch, and whatever principles I distilled from these, then I'll apply separately to the others,” it suggested.

At the hearing, the court asked Bhatia whether the issues across these suits would be common or whether plaintiffs would need to be treated differently.

Bhatia said it depends on the interest claimed. Where a plaintiff asserts a commercial interest founded on property rights in their persona, recognisability will matter, since it is an abuse of the commercial aspect of their image. Where the claim rests on privacy, defamation or dignity, the treatment would be uniform. The exercise, he submitted, is about "disentangling the right into its component parts."

All the remaining personality rights suits are now listed before the Joint Registrar for completion of pleadings.

In Akira Nandan's suit, counsel said the matter had been settled with the first defendant and the offending listings taken down, and sought disposal in terms of the settlement.