New Delhi, April 3 The Delhi High Court has protected the personality rights of preacher Aniruddhacharya, also known as 'Baba Pookie', and restrained the unauthorized use of his name, voice, and image for creating memes, videos, or any other content, including AI or deepfake content.
Justice Tushar Rao Gedela passed the interim order on March 30 in response to a lawsuit filed by Aniruddhacharya.
The court also directed social media companies, Meta, X, and Google, to remove the offending content identified by the plaintiff, which had unlawfully used or imitated his persona.
The court stated that there was a strong prima facie case in favor of the plaintiff, who is a well-known, popular, and well-accepted personality.
The court stated that the nature of the content flagged by him was not "mere parody" and appeared to be disparaging and infringing his personality rights.
It said that the apprehension of damage to the plaintiff's image and personality was real and present.
Aniruddhacharya alleged that several entities were misappropriating his attributes without authorization, license, or consent, with the ulterior motive of deriving illegal commercial gain and exploiting his immense goodwill, commercial value, and reputation.
His counsel submitted that certain deceptive and fabricated content was being circulated to falsely suggest that he endorsed or was associated with fraudulent schemes and spurious goods and services.
Furthermore, the distortion and misrepresentation of his teachings in these posts resulted in a loss of goodwill among his devotees and followers, and also had the potential to further mislead members of the public, the lawyer added.
Several public figures, such as actors Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, her husband Abhishek Bachchan, Salman Khan, 'Art of Living' founder Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, journalist Sudhir Chaudhary, and podcaster Raj Shamani, have previously approached the high court seeking protection of their personality and publicity rights. The court has granted them interim relief.
Recently, the court protected the personality rights of cricketer Gautam Gambhir and actors Sonakshi Sinha and Vivek Oberoi by granting interim relief on their lawsuits.