The Delhi High Court has recently refused to pass any injunction order against the movie ‘Nyay: The Justice’ based on the life of late Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput.
Justice C Hari Shankar said that Rajput’s personality rights as well as rights of privacy and publicity got extinguished with his death and these rights are not inheritable to be espoused by his father.
The Court dismissed a plea by Rajput’s father seeking a stay on the continued streaming of the film on the Lapalap Original Over-The-Top (OTT) platform. The movie was released in June 2021.
The Court observed, “The information contained, and shown, in the impugned film, is entirely derived from items which featured in the media and, therefore, constitute publicly available information. In making a film on the basis thereof, it could not, therefore, be said that the defendants had violated any right of SSR, much less of the plaintiff, especially as the said information had not been questioned or challenged when it appeared in the media, either by SSR or by the plaintiff. Nor were the defendants required to obtain the consent of the plaintiff before making the movie.”
In the detailed order, Justice Hari Shankar clarified that even if the film were to infringe on Rajput’s publicity rights or defame him, those rights are personal to the actor and can’t be inherited by his father.
The Court stated that, “Besides, the movie being based on information in the public domain, which, at the time of its original dissemination, was never challenged or questioned, cannot be sought to be injuncted at this distance of time, especially when it has already been released on the Lapalap platform a while ago and must have been seen, by now, by thousands.”
The Court concluded that ordering the movie to be stopped would infringe upon the defendants’ rights under Article 19(1)(a) of the Indian Constitution, that guarantees freedom of speech and expression.
