The Personality Rights Battle: When Startup Founders Become Celebrities

For most of India’s legal history, personality rights were concerns largely reserved for film stars and cricketers. Amitabh Bachchan went to court over the unauthorised use of his voice, which intuitively made sense given that he is among the country’s most recognisable public figures. 

But Aman Gupta? Why would the founder of a consumer electronics brand need to approach the Delhi High Court to restrain third parties from exploiting his personality rights without permission? 

The HC recently granted Gupta an interim injunction protecting him against the unauthorised use of his name, image, voice, catchphrases, and AI-generated deepfake content. 

Importantly, Gupta is not the first startup founder to pursue such protection. Before him, former BharatPe cofounder Ashneer Grover secured trademarks for his name, image, and signature phrases such as “Ye sab doglapan hai”. 

However, unlike Bollywood celebrities, startup founders did not become public figures through conventional entertainment routes. Take boAt, the company Gupta cofounded with Sameer Mehta. The company makes affordable earphones and smartwatches — a successful consumer business but not the reason Gupta became a recognisable public personality. 

That transformation happened through platform visibility. When Shark Tank India premiered in late 2021, it did something unusual for Indian startups — it made startup founders compelling personalities in their own right. Audiences were not only watching pitches but also the founders — their personalities, disagreements, reactions, and catchphrases.

Gupta, in particular, cultivated something most Indian entrepreneurs had never seriously attempted before — a television persona. He had energy, strong opinions, and memorable one-liners that were repeatedly clipped and circulated online, and phrases such as “Baat to suno” became a part of internet culture. His Instagram following surged, and he increasingly appeared at conferences not just to discuss boAt, but because he himself had become the attraction. 

This is how the businessman became a brand. Shark Tank showed that such stardom no longer calls for acting talent or sporting success; even business acumen counted. 

Notably, Indian courts have increasingly held that a person’s name, likeness, voice, signature, and associated persona are protectable under a combination of tort law, passing off, and the constitutional right to privacy. 

There is no dedicated statute governing personality rights in India. Instead, protections have evolved gradually through case law, drawing partly from the “right of publicity” doctrine developed in the US courts. The Gupta order expands this evolving framework further by explicitly covering AI-generated deepfake content. 

Why This Is Happening Now

Three things converged to make this development inevitable. The first is the sheer reach of digital platforms. A decade ago, a founder’s public visibility was largely limited to media interviews and occasional conference appearances. 

Today, founders who are active on Instagram, appear regularly on podcasts, collaborate with brands, and feature on OTT platforms can build audiences rivaling mid-tier entertainment celebrities.  

The second factor is economic. Once a public figure has enough reach, their identity itself becomes an asset for them as well as those who might want to exploit it without consent. 

The third factor is AI. The ability to generate convincing audio and video of a real person saying things they never said has changed the stakes completely. 

“Deepfake technology makes it trivially easy to put a recognisable, trusted face on a fraudulent pitch. We’ve seen this repeatedly with Mukesh Ambani and Ratan Tata, both have had their likenesses used in fake cryptocurrency and investment ads. The same logic now applies to anyone with sufficient digital authority, including founders,” Harshit Sharma, a lawyer at Delhi High Court, told Inc42.

Before deepfakes, misusing someone’s image or identity required effort — obtaining photographs, manipulating quotes, and manually assembling fraudulent material. Today, convincing synthetic videos can be generated within hours. Courts are now being forced to adapt to a different category of misuse. 

Consumer protection is one of the clearest justifications for these evolving rights. When scammers use trusted founders’ faces to promote fraudulent schemes, the victims are often ordinary consumers who associate those individuals with legitimate business success. Protecting personality rights, in that sense, also protects audiences from deception. 

There is also growing commercial clarity around identity ownership. If a brand wants to use Gupta’s name or image in advertising, there is now an increasingly unambiguous legal understanding that permission, and likely compensation, is required. 

The Uncomfortable Questions

However, not everything about this shift is straightforward. Once an individual attains public figure status, much of what they say and do enters the public domain. India has traditionally upheld freedom of expression, including commentary and criticism involving public figures.

At the same time, once a person enters the public eye, they generally relinquish a significant degree of personal privacy, along with fair use of their publicly available statements and appearances.

“Aman Gupta voluntarily went on national television. He cultivated a public persona. He built a personal brand deliberately and with commercial intent. The protection he’s now claiming exists partly because he spent years making himself famous,” said Lalita Choudhary, a media law expert.

Another concern is where the courts ultimately draw the line. Personality rights exist in tension with free expression. Satire, parody, criticism, and commentary all require some degree of latitude to use public figures’ names and likenesses. If personality protections become too expansive, they risk chilling legitimate speech.

Indian courts have generally attempted to maintain this distinction carefully, but overly aggressive enforcement remains a real possibility wherever such doctrines evolve. 

However, Priya Goutham, cofounder of Chennai-based digital marketing startup Bunjy Digital says that as founders become the face of their companies, their identity itself turns into an asset that carries trust, influence, and commercial value. 

“Visibility built over years can now be replicated, manipulated, and monetised in minutes. The court recognising this shift is an important step for every entrepreneur building in public,” she told Inc42. 

What Indian Courts Are Actually Doing

Indian jurisprudence on personality rights has evolved significantly in the last decade. The Amitabh Bachchan order in 2022 marked an important milestone, becoming one of the first Indian rulings to provide sweeping protection across multiple elements of an individual’s persona.  

Subsequent rulings, including the Anil Kapoor case, added further texture to the doctrine. Each decision has incrementally expanded clarity around what kinds of unauthorised exploitation are not permitted. 

The Aman Gupta order is particularly noteworthy for two reasons. First, because it applies these protections to an entrepreneur rather than a typical celebrity or entertainment icon, expanding the category of people who may claim such protection. Second, it explicitly addresses AI-generated content, an area courts globally are still struggling to regulate coherently. 

However, legislation remains unclear. “India doesn’t have a dedicated personality rights or right of publicity law. What the Gupta case and others like it are building is a body of precedent that a future statute could codify, but without that statute, the protection is case-by-case, dependent on having the resources and profile to bring litigation,” said Sharma, the lawyer quoted above. 

Going ahead, the trend of founders seeking personality rights protection is likely to become increasingly formalised, especially as founders grow into celebrity-like figures. 

There are now PR agencies that specialise in building founder profiles only, and not just business PR. Investors and VCs increasingly consider a founder’s social media reach while evaluating deals, partly because founders with audience distribution can often market their way through challenges that might sink less visible companies. Content studios are pitching founder-led shows to streaming platforms. 

This means, personality rights may soon become a routine part of startup building itself. From being an emergency legal response after a deepfake incident, it is expected to turn into a proactive layer of brand protection, akin to trademarking a company name or structuring incorporation documents properly. 

It also means courts will continue confronting difficult questions around the boundaries between commerce and exploitation, public persona and private identity, satire and defamation — especially as AI-generated media becomes increasingly sophisticated. 

Edited by Vinaykumar Rai

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