What exactly are Karan Johar’s personality rights?

The Bombay High Court last week reinforced the fact that individuals are vested with personality rights as a key part of their right to privacy under Article 21. Karan Johar recently sought protection of his personality rights from the court after a movie scheduled to release last June made unauthorised use of his name.

What are personality rights? Which law defines it? Who can claim protection and what constitutes an infringement? We will discuss all of this in today’s Weekly. 

What are personality rights?

While ‘personality rights’ as such are not defined in any law in India, several Indian Courts have recognised this as a right evolving from the right to privacy guaranteed under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. Personality rights are often interchangeably referred to as publicity rights.  An early definition can be traced to a 1981 United States District Court order which stated, 

“The right to publicity, popularly known as personality rights, in its most basic sense is the right to protect, control, and profit from one’s image, name, or likeness.”

Indian courts have relied on this definition. They discern two key aspects to personality or publicity rights—one, a person has the right to protect their image or other identifiable markers of their being from being commercially exploited by others without their permission. Second, they have the right to be left alone, so no one can breach their private life without their permission. 

In the current case, the court went on to highlight that those who have acquired a celebrity status and have a brand value of their image have personality rights which can be read under Section 17 of the Copyright Act, 1957. This section states that the original creator of a work is the owner of the work unless they are paid for it by someone else. So any unauthorised use of their image can lead to copyright violations.

What are some of the landmark cases on personality rights?

In 1994, the Supreme Court of India in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu, popularly known as the Auto Shankar case, highlighted that it is a person’s right to control any form of commercial use of their human identity. It said that no one can publish anything about an any one’s private life, irrespective of whether it’s truthful or not, flattering or critical, without their consent. 

This issue was further elaborated upon by the Delhi High Court in the 2011 case of Titan Industries Ltd. v. Ramkumar Jewellers. Here, the court said that to establish a personality right, the person must be able to justify before a court of law that their right over human identity or persona is valid and they must be ‘identifiable’ or uniquely recognisable. 

Superstar Rajnikanth also got relief similar to Karan Johar from the Madras High Court in 2015 in the  Shivaji Rao Gaikwad v. Varsha Productions case. Here, the court stated that if someone uses a celebrity’s name or reference without their permission and if they are easily identified by the use of the name or any other reference, then it will constitute an infringement of their personality rights. 

What relief did the Court grant Karan Johar in the current case?

The current dispute arose out of a film slated to release in June, 2024 titled ‘Shaadi Ke Director Karan Aur Johar’. Karan Johar approached the Bombay High Court seeking an injunction to stop the release of this film since it used his name in an unauthorised manner. He claimed that since the reference to his name and his work was undoubtedly identifiable, it was a breach of his economic right to commercially use his image. 

The Court had initially placed an interim restriction on the release of the film in June, 2024  but last week, the court stated that release of this film will result in irreparable injury to Johar’s image. To protect his right to privacy, which includes the right to publicity and personality, the injunction, which is a court order restraining a wrongful act, against the release of the film was made absolute.