Publicity Rights and the Right to Privacy in India

The right to publicity is the right to protect, control, and profit from one’s image, name, or likeness. This right is generally considered as a facet of right to privacy. This article aims to study the concomitant development of right to publicity and right to privacy in different jurisdictions such as the United States, United Kingdom, and India. In the United States, it has been observed that right to publicity has become a right in itself which is independent from right to privacy. In contrast, the United Kingdom does not recognize a right to publicity. The main focus, however, of this article is to understand the development of right to publicity in India. This article finds that though the Indian courts have accepted right to publicity within the paradigm of Intellectual Property Rights, the acceptance of the right to publicity as a facet of right to privacy is still at a nascent stage