What are Personality Rights?

Note4Students

From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :

Prelims level : Personality Rights

Mains level : Read the attached story

The Delhi High Court recently passed an interim order to prevent the unlawful use of a megastar’s name, image and voice.

What did the HC say?

The court, through its order, restrained persons at large from infringing the personality rights of the actor.

Celebrities are protected from commercial misuse of their name and personality.
However, there have been instances where the consumers are misled owing to false advertisements or endorsements by such personalities.
Due to such cases, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs has made a notification in 2022 to keep a check on misleading adverts and endorsements of consumer products by imposing a penalty on the endorser.

Personality rights refer to the right of a person to protect his/her personality under the right to privacy or property.
These rights are important to celebrities as their names, photographs or even voices can easily be misused in various advertisements by different companies to boost their sales.
Therefore, it is necessary for renowned personalities/celebrities to register their names to save their personality rights.
A large list of unique personal attributes contribute to the making of a celebrity.
All of these attributes need to be protected, such as name, nickname, stage name, picture, likeness, image and any identifiable personal property, such as a distinctive race car.

Personality rights are different from publicity rights.
Publicity rights are governed by statutes like the Trade marks Act 1999 and the Copyright Act 1957.

Right of publicity: It is the right to keep one’s image and likeness from being commercially exploited without permission or contractual compensation, which is similar (but not identical) to the use of a trademark;
Right to privacy: It is the right to not have one’s personality represented publicly without permission.

However, under common law jurisdictions, publicity rights fall into the realm of the ‘tort of passing off’.
Passing off takes place when someone intentionally or unintentionally passes off their goods or services as those belonging to another party.
Often, this type of misrepresentation damages the goodwill of a person or business, resulting in financial or reputational damage.

The Delhi High Court in 2011 made an observation in the case of Arun Jaitley vs Network Solutions Private Limited and Ors.
In this case, former finance minister filed a suit seeking permanent injunction against the defendants from misuse and immediate transfer of the domain name www.arunjaitley.com.
The Court stated that the popularity or fame of individual will be no different on the internet than in reality.