Identity as an Intellectual Property: A Study Delving Into Personality Rights: Deepfakes, AI Resurrection, and the Need for a Separate Statutory Framework.
This article is written by Bhadra Ravisankar, pursuing B.A.LL.B from Christ Deemed to be
University, Bengaluru.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being adopted in digital media, raising challenges to current understandings of personality rights and identity protection. Names, images, voices, gestures, and public personas all have significant commercial value in today's economy due to celebrity culture, branding, and the visibility created by the internet. This is occurring in a climate shaped by a growing reliance on new technology such as deepfake videos, voice cloning and AI managed avatars to replicate human identity at an unprecedented level of detail, realism, and speed. These advances have led to a clear recognition of the limitations of existing legal regimes in relation to personality rights protection, particularly in Indian law where they continue to be protected in a fragmented manner through privacy laws, actions for passing off, trademark law, and judicial interpretation.
This paper will discuss the relevance of personality rights as intellectual property that has commercial value, and assess the legal issues raised by synthetic media, digital impersonation, and post-mortem AI-generated recreations. It will show how existing legal remedies are insufficient to deal with issues raised by technological reproduction of identity and commercial exploitation of identity. Finally, the paper will highlight the need for a new statutory framework that explicitly recognizes personality rights as both property and dignity-based rights within contemporary digital environments.
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