Notes on Personality Rights After a Person Dies

Personality rights protect the commercial and dignitary value of a person's identity: name, image, voice, likeness and the signals that stand in for them.

The difficult question is what happens after death. Personality rights in India have grown out of passing off, privacy and constitutional dignity rather than a single statute, and each of those roots behaves differently once the person is gone. Passing off can survive where goodwill survives. Privacy, framed as a personal right, is harder to carry forward.

Courts have increasingly been willing to restrain the unauthorised commercial exploitation of a deceased personality where the estate can show continuing goodwill and a real risk of deception. That framing keeps the reasoning within familiar intellectual property territory instead of creating a free standing post mortem right.

For anyone advising an estate, the practical work is unglamorous: register what can be registered, document continuing use, and keep the goodwill visible. Rights that are exercised are far easier to defend than rights that are merely claimed.