Mumbai: Bombay High Court on Wednesday granted interim relief to Bollywood actor Preity Zinta, directing the deletion of online posts that she claimed violated her personality, publicity and moral rights, bringing back her trademark dimpled smile. She sought that social media intermediaries be directed to take down AI-generated deepfake and morphed content of hers, and Justice Madhav Jamdar passing the order observed misuse of such content does affect a person’s fundamental rights.Justice Jamdar, sitting singly, reminded online platforms of their legal obligation towards due diligence under the Information Technology rules that govern intermediaries. He expressed concern over the role of intermediaries in tackling offensive content.Zinta through solicitor Jai Munim filed a suit seeking protection of her personality rights. The material including deep fake images, AI and superimposed visuals and morphed pictures prima facie violated her moral, publicity and personality rights, the HC held, and infringed her privacy rights.Her plea for interim protection also sought orders to restrain named and unnamed websites and people from using, exploiting or misappropriating the use of her name, nickname, photographs, likeness including her distinctive dimpled smile, caricature, voice, mannerisms, persona or other attributes of her personality in any form for commercial or personal gain.The HC granting her the various reliefs clarified that for any future infringement, if she approaches the intermediaries like Google, Meta and X to take down such content and if they object citing genuineness, she has the liberty to apply for appropriate orders again.Her suit said domain names also exist in her name, which she did not create. It said, “Personality traits are an integral/intrinsic part of her personality rights and/or publicity rights, in which the Plaintiff exercises (and ought to exercise) exclusive control.”Zinta is also the co-owner of Punjab Kings, a franchise in the Indian Premier League, and her concern in the suit was also that AI-generated content was rapidly becoming more realistic with chatbot-style interactions posted and hosted online by alleged infringers.
