As celebrity endorsements increasingly shift toward digital-first campaigns, the legal risks surrounding brand partnerships are becoming more complex and harder to control. What was once largely limited to contract breaches and unauthorised post-campaign usage has now expanded into newer threats such as AI-generated deepfakes, unauthorised digital exploitation, prolonged online use, and personality rights violations. These challenges are fast emerging as significant business, legal and reputational risks for celebrities, brands and digital platforms alike. To understand how India’s celebrity endorsement ecosystem is evolving, and where the biggest legal vulnerabilities lie, Tech Achieve Media (TAM) spoke with Gaurav Sahay, Founding Partner at Arthashastra Legal, on the growing legal and commercial risks emerging within the endorsement ecosystem, particularly in the context of AI-led misuse, unauthorised digital exploitation, and contractual enforcement gaps.
TAM: Does the celebrity endorsement ecosystem currently suffer from legal and structural loopholes?
Gaurav Sahay: It is not so much a new loophole as it is a judicial reaffirmation of a structural weakness that has long existed in endorsement, wherein the evidentiary burden and contractual precision is required to successfully enforce publicity and personality rights. This exposes three systemic issues in the celebrity endorsement ecosystem. Indian law still lacks a codified, standalone statutory framework governing personality or publicity rights. The gap between contractual rights and enforceability. Judicial reluctance to award notional or speculative damages in endorsement disputes.
TAM: How common is it for brands to continue using celebrity images after endorsement agreements expire? What can celebrities do to safeguard themselves?
Gaurav Sahay: Though it is not uncommon, in practice, this manifests through residual inventory circulation, delayed withdrawal of marketing materials, continued use by distributors or retailers beyond the principal brand’s control, or digital persistence (old ads remaining online).
Celebrities can build the primary defence which emanates out of a robust contract engineering. Endorsement agreements must contain explicit “sunset clauses” requiring immediate cessation of use upon expiry, coupled with mandatory recall/destruction of inventory bearing the celebrity’s likeness. Further, there should be clearly defined “sell-off periods” (if permitted), beyond which continued use becomes per se breach. Importantly, contracts should impose audit rights, allowing the celebrity (or their representatives) to inspect compliance across the supply chain. Equally critical is the inclusion of liquidated damages clauses or pre-estimated damages for post-term misuse.
TAM: Other than expired agreements, how else are celebrity images and likenesses being misused today?
Gaurav Sahay: The misuse of celebrity likeness today extends well beyond the traditional problem of post expiry contractual overreach. What has evolved is a multi-layered ecosystem where a celebrity’s image, voice, persona, and even style signature is commercially exploited without authorization across both physical and digital vectors. The legal challenge is enforcement must rely on a combination of personality rights, passing off, trademark law, copyright, and, increasingly, data protection and unfair trade practice frameworks.
With generative AI tools, it is now possible to create hyper realistic videos or voiceovers of celebrities promoting products they have never engaged with. This form of misuse is qualitatively different because it scales infinitely, is difficult to trace, and can cross jurisdictions instantaneously. From a legal perspective, this raises overlapping issues of identity theft, violation of personality rights.
TAM: What kind of damages do celebrities suffer due to such unauthorized usage?
Gaurav Sahay: The impact of such misuse and quantification of damages is complex. The most immediate harm is economic loss through dilution of exclusivity. Endorsement value is fundamentally premised on scarcity and controlled association and an unauthorized usage erodes this exclusivity, reducing the premium a celebrity can command in future contracts.
TAM: Has the problem aggravated in the digital era, and what legal recourse is currently available to celebrities?
Gaurav Sahay: There is, today, a reasonably evolved though still imperfect understanding of both legal recourse and enforcement strategy in cases of unauthorized use of celebrity likeness. This evolution is however, reactive and the underlying problem has unquestionably intensified, particularly due to digital and AI-driven misuse.
Celebrities typically proceed on a combination of violation of personality/publicity rights, passing off, trademark infringement, and statutory violations under consumer and IT laws. Courts have in recent years shown increasing willingness to recognise and enforce personality rights in a structured manner granting injunctive relief restraining unauthorised use of name, voice, image, and persona across digital platforms. These decisions are significant because they move beyond traditional passing off and recognise persona as a protectable proprietary interest.
The enforcement environment has become significantly more complex. The law is catching up, but the misuse ecosystem is evolving faster. The broader reality today is that rights without real time enforceability are increasingly insufficient in a digitally amplified marketplace.
