Gautam Gambhir moved Delhi HC to protect personality rights

The Delhi High Court on Friday listed for hearing on March 23 a lawsuit by the Indian cricket team’s head coach Gautam Gambhir to stop the misuse and exploitation of his image, voice and other attributes of his personality for creating deepfake content and for commercial gain.

Gambhir’s counsel submitted before Justice Jyoti Singh that besides infringement of his personality rights, it was also a question of his dignity.

Advocate Jai Anant Dehadrai asserted that the offending content had “material consequence” on Gambhir as there were fabricated videos purportedly showing him resigning as the head coach after a poor match performance or assaulting a fellow player.

“Some things have material consequences. Imagine the head coach of the Indian team and words are being put in his mouth through deepfake to say he is resigning from the team. It has created a lot of issues,” Dehadrai said.

“His commercial value is proven. He has endorsements from large brands,” the lawyer added.

Dehadrai further informed the court that the user who published the resignation video, which has 29 lakh views, took it down and apologised after the suit was filed.

Asserting that Gambhir has 23 years of national service as a player and is now a coach, Dehadrai sought an interim order from the court at this stage to restrain several entities, including unnamed defendants, from misusing his personality rights.

The court deferred the hearing in the matter after noticing certain discrepancies in the lawsuit and granted time to the counsel to correct the same.

In the lawsuit, Gambhir has sought directions to protect his personality and publicity rights from a coordinated campaign of digital impersonation, AI-generated deepfakes and unauthorised commercial exploitation across social media platforms.

The plea said there were several social media accounts which were using artificial intelligence, face-swapping and voice-cloning technologies to create realistic videos falsely depicting Gambhir.

The lawsuit also objected to the unauthorised sale of merchandise bearing his name and likeness on e-commerce platforms.