The Delhi High Court is weighing how far personality rights extend in a case brought on behalf of Aaradhya Bachchan, the daughter of actors Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, against a group of YouTube channels and unnamed defendants.
The suit was originally filed in 2023 through her father, after several channels published videos falsely claiming Aaradhya was seriously ill, hospitalised, or had died. The court has since expanded its inquiry into broader questions about how Indian law should treat fabricated content about public figures and their families.
Justice Bhambhani, presiding over a recent hearing, remarked that the concept of personality rights is acquiring amoebic proportions, adding that everything is being treated as personality rights, according to reporting from India Legal and Bar and Bench. The court framed three questions for consideration: whether fake news can amount to an intellectual property violation, whether defamation itself can be treated as an IP right, and whether the reputation tied to a well-known family name carries across generations.
The case builds on earlier rulings involving Aaradhya’s grandfather, Amitabh Bachchan, whose voice, image and other personal characteristics were already recognised by the Delhi High Court as protected from unauthorised commercial use. Legal commentators have described the Bachchan family’s string of cases as reshaping how Indian courts approach personality rights, an area of law that has expanded rapidly as deepfakes and misinformation have become easier to produce and distribute.
Back in April 2023, the same court had restrained the defendants from publishing material about Aaradhya’s health, with Justice C Hari Shankar noting at the time that every child, celebrity or not, is entitled to dignity and privacy.
The matter remains pending, with the court yet to rule on the broader legal questions it has raised. A verdict is likely to be closely watched by media law practitioners, given its potential to set precedent for how the children of public figures are protected from fabricated coverage online.
