Bombay High Court Grants Interim Relief to Shruti Haasan in AI Deepfake Case
In an interim order on Shruti Haasan’s plea seeking directions to restrain AI generated contents infringing her personality rights by misuse of her identity or likeness, the Bombay High Court has granted ad-interim relief to the actress.
Actress Shruti Haasan had moved the Court pleading for protection of her personality and publicity rights. According to Haasan, her personality rights have been violated by unauthorized AI generated deepfakes of her photos and videos and morphed videos misusing her identity for creating artificial intelligence chatbots commercial endorsement. Sharing of her images on social media without authorization and selling merchandise without her consent also infringed her publicity rights.
In his interim order, Justice Madhav Jamdar acknowledged the serious damages which are caused due to digitally altered images and deepfakes online.
The judge further noted that Haasan’s plea for protection of her privacy and personality rights has been backed by the Constitution.
The Court further issued directions to block the URLs mentioned by Haasan in her plea.
Key Development
Haasan had filed a suit last month praying for relief against various respondents who are creators, publishers, hosts, platforms and websites for posting content that used her identity without authorization.
During the previous hearing, the Bombay High Court had given last chance to some of the defendants who have failed to file a reply or enter an appearance so far.
Considering that several respondents still failed to enter an appearance or file a defence even after multiple weeks of granting them last chance, the Court now moved to grant ad-interim relief.
The counsel appearing for few of the defendants who had appeared for the proceedings assured the Court that AI deepfake contents would be taken down from their platforms as soon as they receive URLs in a legible format from Haasan’s lawyers.
Senior Advocates Rashmin Khandekar with advocates Ameet Naik, Madhu Gadodia, Aman Saraf, Malabika and Unnati Gambani of Anand & Naik practised for Haasan.
