Kriti Sanon filed a petition before the Delhi High Court seeking personality rights protection, and the court on Friday indicated it would use the matter to examine the broader legal framework governing such claims, given the growing number of comparable cases coming before it.

During the hearing, Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav directed advocate Pravin Anand — representing Sanon — to put together a thorough dossier covering judicial precedents and background material on personality rights, encompassing both the scope of available protections and the authority of the High Court's Intellectual Property Division to hear disputes of that nature.

Noting that such applications were arriving before the bench with growing regularity, the judge indicated that the underlying legal questions called for a broader inquiry than the immediate dispute could accommodate.

Judges in the IPD proceedings directed Anand to lay out how personality rights operate — which personal attributes draw legal protection and whether that category of dispute belongs within the division's jurisdiction. In the course of those proceedings, Anand put forward the position that personality rights are capable of covering a range of identifying attributes — among them a person's name, voice, facial appearance, photographs, and video recordings.

The use of a person's likeness or identity without that individual's knowledge or permission was flagged as another matter surfacing in cases of this kind. Justice Kaurav invited counsel to bring forward applicable case law and academic material bearing on the question.

The bench directed counsel to furnish submissions and reasoned analysis on personality rights, noting that a broad ruling would follow once the available material had been reviewed. Addressing the court, Anand gave notice that the compilation would be lodged before the day's end and put forward the position that no question of jurisdiction arose in relation to Sanon's matter.

A follow-up hearing in the case has been scheduled for 29 October.

Personality rights petitions lodged at the Delhi High Court by actors, athletes, and other prominent individuals have been growing in number, forming the broader context within which these proceedings unfold. At the heart of these disputes typically lie claims that a person's name, image, recorded voice, or other defining personal attributes were put to commercial use without their consent.

Personality rights petitions touching on figures such as actors Kangana Ranaut, Tabu, and Vijay Deverakonda, cricketers Abhishek Sharma and Yuvraj Singh, politician Shashi Tharoor, and Andhra Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan have all come before this court on earlier occasions.

Wider adoption of digital tools and AI-driven technologies has added layers of complexity to the matter, especially where disputes touch on allegedly unauthorised reproductions in digital form, the impersonation of real individuals, synthetic media such as deepfakes, and the commercial exploitation of a public figure's likeness or identity.

Personality rights broadly serve to shield the various facets of a person's identity from being exploited without consent. These disputes can draw in questions spanning privacy protections, the right to control one's public image, intellectual property ownership, and how a person's identity gets put to commercial ends.

When weighing protections of this kind, courts also take into account how they interact with other recognised interests — among them the freedom to publish news, engage in artistic work, and make other lawful uses of a public figure's name or image. The body of legal references assembled at the court's request is anticipated to guide its examination of the underlying questions, among them how far personality rights protections extend and which venue holds proper authority to hear such disputes.