Three days ago we published a piece asking what a ₹7,000 crore AI damages claim with no named defendant and no filing was actually worth. We said what a real personality-rights case looks like: a named defendant, specific documented uses, and a court.
On 1 October the Bombay High Court produced one.
The Order
Justice Madhav Jamdar passed an interim order in a suit brought by Samantha Ruth Prabhu, directing the takedown of content misusing her name, image and voice.
Per LiveLaw and Bar and Bench, the restrained material covers morphed and deepfake pornographic images, AI-generated obscene photographs and video, unauthorised audio clips, and other derogatory content.
The defendants are not anonymous. They include Google, Meta Platforms, a set of pornographic websites, AI chatbots, private entities, and John Doe parties for those not yet identified.
The Part That Matters Beyond This Case
The court did not stop at ordering takedowns. It went to the obligations of the platforms themselves.
Justice Jamdar invoked Rule 3 of the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, and said: “intermediaries must show due diligence while performing their duties under Rule 3. This pertains to the fundamental rights of the citizens.”
Read that second sentence again. The court is framing platform due diligence not as a compliance checkbox but as something attached to constitutional rights. The order grounds itself in Article 19(1)(a) and Article 21, and in moral rights under the Copyright Act.
An Indian court telling Google and Meta that their obligations under the intermediary rules engage fundamental rights is a considerably more useful development for Indian performers than any damages figure announced on Instagram.
Why This Is The Template
Compare the two approaches side by side, because the contrast is instructive and it is not about the individuals involved.
One is a public announcement of an intention to seek an enormous sum from an unnamed company in another jurisdiction, with no filing, no methodology and no defendant who can respond.
The other is a suit filed in an Indian court, against identified platforms that operate here and can be ordered to act, seeking a specific remedy: take it down and keep it down.
The second one produces an order within days. The first one produces headlines.
Indian personality-rights jurisprudence has been built this way over the last few years, through the Delhi and Bombay High Courts, case by case, with named parties and takedown orders rather than spectacular damages claims. It is unglamorous and it works.
The Thing Nobody Wants To Say Plainly
The content this order restrains is, in substantial part, non-consensual sexual imagery generated by AI systems.
That is the actual shape of the deepfake problem for women in the Indian film industry. Not voice cloning for an ad. Not a fake endorsement. Pornographic material made from their faces, distributed at scale, by tools that did not exist five years ago and that require no skill to operate.
Rashmika Mandanna, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and others have been through versions of this. The coverage usually reaches for the word “shocking” and moves on by Thursday.
An interim order naming Google and Meta as parties and tying their obligations to Article 21 is a more serious response than a week of outrage, and it is the first thing in this whole conversation that actually binds somebody.
What Is Still Missing
A takedown order is remedial. It addresses material that already exists and has already circulated.
It does nothing about the systems that generate it, which are mostly hosted outside India, trained on material scraped without consent, and operated by entities an Indian court cannot easily reach. It does nothing about the next model. And an order obtained by a performer with the resources to litigate does not help a junior artiste with the same problem and no lawyer.
India has no statute specifically addressing synthetic sexual imagery. The courts are doing this with the IT Rules, the Copyright Act and the Constitution, which is creative lawyering filling a legislative gap.
Bengaluru Baath Take
This is how it is done, and we are glad to say so three days after saying what the alternative looked like.
Name the defendants. File in a court that can reach them. Ask for the specific thing you want. Get an order.
The sentence worth keeping from Justice Jamdar is the one about fundamental rights, because it moves intermediary due diligence out of the compliance department and into constitutional territory. If that framing holds on appeal, it will matter for a great deal more than one actor’s case.
And somebody in Parliament should notice that the courts are currently doing this job with tools that were not designed for it.
Sources
- LiveLaw, the order, the bench, the defendants, the categories restrained and the Rule 3 observation
- Bar and Bench, the interim order and its scope
- Siasat, takedown coverage
- The420, the restraint on unauthorised AI use
