Cricketer Abhishek Sharma Moves Delhi High Court Seeking Protection Of Personality Rights

Indian cricketer Abhishek Sharma has moved the Delhi High Court seeking removal of online AI generated defamatory content allegedly infringing his personality rights.

The court refused to pass any interim orders after finding discrepancies between the screenshots relied upon by Sharma and the tabulated list of URLs annexed to his plaint. It directed him to file an additional affidavit with correctly matching screenshots before the matter is taken up again on July 9.

Refusing to pass any orders today, Justice Jyoti Singh observed, "This screenshot is way different from what you showed me," after being shown the material relied upon by the plaintiff. Declining to grant any relief, she remarked, "I can't pass an order like this," and directed the plaintiff to place on record screenshots matching the URLs listed in both tables of the annexure.

Counsel appearing for intermediaries also submitted that Sharma had initially sought takedown of 25 URLs, but the list had since expanded to nearly 4,000 URLs. They argued that such expanding requests effectively sought to "clean up the internet."

The intermediaries further raised concerns that litigants are increasingly dressing up defamatory content as personality rights violations to secure the takedown of online content. They argued that defamation and personality rights are distinct causes of action.