Delhi High Court decrees Arjun Kapoor's personality rights suit and orders takedown of AI-generated links

The Delhi High Court has decreed actor Arjun Kapoor's suit seeking protection of his personality and publicity rights against unauthorised commercial exploitation of his name, image and likeness, including through AI-generated content. The case is Arjun Kapoor v. Artist Booking Compny & Ors., heard by Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav.

Because no defendant filed a written statement or otherwise controverted the plaint, the Court held that the averments in the plaint were liable to be treated as admitted, relying on Rajat Sharma & Anr. v. Tamara Doc & Ors. Interim directions against several defendants were made absolute. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and the Department of Telecommunications were directed to take down infringing links attributable to one defendant that remained active, along with other links specified in the plaint. Kapoor may approach Meta Platforms and Google with later-discovered infringing URLs, which those platforms will review under their own policies, with liberty to return to the Court if they do not act.

An earlier interim order of 29 April had restrained the defendants from using Kapoor's persona without consent, including through AI, deepfakes and face morphing, and barred merchandise such as T-shirts, mugs and posters made with those technologies.

Why it matters for digital humans: India's Delhi High Court has now issued a run of personality-rights orders covering AI likeness misuse, and this one shows the pattern maturing from interim injunction to final decree. Two details matter operationally. First, the Court routed enforcement through MeitY and DoT rather than relying solely on platform goodwill, which gives the order teeth against links that survive individual takedown requests. Second, the ex parte posture — defendants who never appeared — means the judgment establishes relief mechanics rather than contested doctrine. Anyone licensing celebrity likeness for avatar products in India should read the merchandising restraint as the live risk surface: the interim order covered physical goods made with face-morphing tools, not only synthetic video.