In a major relief to Aishwarya Rai, the Delhi High Court has ruled in favour of the actor, granting her protection from unauthorised commercial use of her name, image, voice, or other attributes for commercial or personal gain without her consent.
The ruling comes a few days after the noted actor approached the court to protect her personality rights and restrain those using her personal images and name, along with stopping the spread of her AI-generated, morphed photos.
Senior advocate Sandeep Sethi, appearing for Aishwarya, said that her identity is being exploited for both commercial gain and making inappropriate content when they brought the matter to the court a few days ago. Sandeep named a company, Aishwarya Nation Wealth, which falsely listed the actor as a chairperson when she had no legitimate affiliation with them. He clarified that his client had no awareness of it and was not involved with such entities.
An ex parte ad interim injunction was passed by Justice Tejas Karia on September 9 where the court said that "in such cases of unauthorised exploitation of one’s personality rights, can’t turn a blind eye to the same and shall protect the aggrieved parties so as to avert any harm to them resulting from the said unauthorised exploitation." It also highlighted that misuse of her name and images not only causes financial loss to Bachchan but also harms her dignity, reputation and goodwill.
The court directed Google LLC to remove several URLs mentioned in the lawsuit within 72 hours and to provide subscriber information of operators in a sealed format. An order was also sent to The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to block the said URLs within a week.
