International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research

E-ISSN: 2582-2160   •   Impact Factor: 9.24

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Call for Paper Volume 8, Issue 5 (September-October 2026) Submit your research before last 3 days of October to publish your research paper in the issue of September-October.
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Volume 8 Issue 5
September-October 2026

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Personality Rights And The Doctrinal Confusion Of Categories: Reassessing The Copyright, Trademark And Privacy Overlap In Indian Law After The 2026 Interim Orders

Author(s) Mona Mishra, Aadya Chauhan
Country India
Abstract Abstract
Indian courts have granted increasingly assertive relief against the digital misuse of celebrity identity, from injunctions restraining deepfakes to takedown directions against artificial intelligence chatbot platforms. This paper argues that a recurring feature of these 2026 orders, most visibly the Delhi High Court's interim order in Allu Arjun v. Frankly Retail Pvt. Ltd., is the treatment of personality attributes as constituting the plaintiff's copyright, a characterisation that cannot be reconciled with the closed categories of protectable work under Section 13 of the Copyright Act, 1957. This is not a stylistic slip. It marks a real shift away from earlier decisions that layered privacy, passing off and trademark reasoning without triggering any one statute's defined consequences, toward an approach that expressly invokes copyright and thereby imports duration, assignability and infringement tests that were never designed for identity claims. Drawing on the existing case law, comparative statutory and judicial models from the United States and Germany, and the practical consequences of getting the label wrong, the paper argues that courts should confine identity relief to the passing off and privacy frameworks that already work well, reserving copyright language for cases that genuinely involve a copyrightable work, and that Parliament should consider a narrowly drawn statutory right of publicity modelled on the free expression carve outs already recognised in Indian passing off jurisprudence.
Keywords Personality Rights, Passing off, Copyright Overlap, Right of Publicity, Deepfakes
Published In Volume 8, Issue 5, September-October 2026
Published On 2026-09-12
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E-ISSN 2582-2160
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CrossRef DOI prefix of IJFMR is 10.36948/ijfmr

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