DIGITAL RESURRECTION WITHOUT RIGHTS: THE ABSENCE OF POSTHUMOUS PERSONALITY AND VOICE RIGHTS FOR DECEASED ARTISTS IN INDIA’S AI ERA
AUTHOR – SAMRIDHI MISHRA, STUDENT AT NARSEE MONJI INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT STUDIES (DEEMED TO BE UNIVERSITY), NAVI MUMBAI.
BEST CITATION – SAMRIDHI MISHRA, DIGITAL RESURRECTION WITHOUT RIGHTS: THE ABSENCE OF POSTHUMOUS PERSONALITY AND VOICE RIGHTS FOR DECEASED ARTISTS IN INDIA’S AI ERA, INDIAN JOURNAL OF LEGAL REVIEW (IJLR), 6 (10) OF 2026, PG. 233-241, APIS – 3920 – 0001 & ISSN – 2583-2344.
ABSTRACT
Indian courts have, in a short but consistent line of cases, granted living celebrities injunctive relief against unauthorized AI voice-cloning by reading together the right to privacy under Article 21 and common-law passing-off principles. This jurisprudence rests on doctrinal foundations dignity, autonomy, ongoing commercial control that are inherently tied to a living plaintiff and do not obviously survive death. This paper asks a single, narrow question: when an AI platform clones a deceased Indian artist’s voice for commercial gain, without consent from the artist’s estate, does Indian law give that estate any cause of action at all? Using the viral AI-generated “Kishore Kumar” recordings of early 2026 as a live fact pattern, the paper maps six candidate doctrines constitutional privacy, authorial moral rights, performers’ moral rights, performers’ economic rights, trademark protection for the deceased, and passing-off against the specific harm of synthetic voice recreation. It finds that India’s personality-rights framework, built entirely around living-plaintiff reasoning, offers no doctrine squarely fitted to this harm: the rights that do survive death (authorial moral rights, performers’ economic rights, trademark) were drafted for different harms (distortion of an existing work, reproduction of a fixed performance, source confusion), while the doctrine most directly on point performers’ moral rights under Section 38B of the Copyright Act, 1957 contains no express survival mechanism at all, unlike its authorial counterpart. Drawing on comparative material from California’s amended postmortem right of publicity and Tennessee’s ELVIS Act, the paper proposes a narrow, term-limited statutory right for India, distinct from and independent of its living-persons framework, calibrated to close the specific gap this fact pattern has exposed.
Keywords: posthumous personality rights, voice cloning, performers’ rights, Copyright Act 1957, artificial intelligence, right of publicity