Arijit Singh v. Codible Ventures LLP & Ors.

Arijit Singh is one of the best-known playback singers in Hindi cinema. In July 2024 he filed a commercial intellectual-property suit in the Bombay High Court, registered as Commercial IP Suit (L) No. 23443 of 2024, together with an interim application (L) No. 23560 of 2024. He asked the court to protect his name, voice and vocal style, manner of singing, photograph, image, likeness, caricature and signature from unauthorised commercial exploitation. He also invoked moral rights in his performances under Section 38-B of the Copyright Act, 1957.¹

The suit is among the first in India to target tools that copy a performer's voice, rather than only his face or name. The plaintiff alleged that AI services allowed users to turn any speech or song into his voice, and that other defendants used his name and image to sell goods or to draw traffic and events. He also said he had chosen not to take up brand endorsements for several years, so any commercial use of his persona was unauthorised and could mislead the public.¹

The plaint named 38 defendants. As summarised in the order, the claims fell into the following groups:¹⁵

Defendant 10 was not pressed for relief at this stage.¹ SpicyIP's account adds that the plaintiff relied on screenshots, screen recordings and videos as evidence.⁵

Justice R. I. Chagla passed the order ex parte on 26 July 2024, finding that notice to the defendants would defeat the purpose of the application. The court first found, prima facie, that the plaintiff is a notable performer with substantial goodwill and celebrity standing in India. It held that his name, voice, photograph or caricature, image, likeness and persona are protectable under personality and publicity rights, relying on the Bombay High Court's earlier Karan Johar and Applause Entertainment v. Meta decisions and the Delhi High Court's Anil Kapoor v. Simply Life India.¹ SpicyIP also lists Amitabh Bachchan v. Rajat Nagi and D.M. Entertainment v. Baby Gift House among the precedents.⁵

On the facts, the court held that the plaintiff could be specifically identified in the uses complained of and that those uses appeared to be for commercial and personal gain without consent. On the AI platforms, it said that making tools available to convert any voice into a celebrity's voice without consent appears to violate the celebrity's personality rights.¹⁴ It noted the risk to the plaintiff's career and livelihood and to the potential misuse of such tools. SpicyIP reports that the court said the case "shocked the conscience".⁵

On free speech, the court accepted that expression allows critique and commentary, but said it does not give a licence to exploit a celebrity's persona commercially. Quoting the Supreme Court's decision in R. Rajagopal, the order noted that dilution, tarnishment and blurring are actionable torts, and it described privacy as a "right to be let alone" rooted in Article 21. It did not separately decide the plaintiff's moral-rights claim under Section 38-B.¹⁵

The court granted the following reliefs until the next hearing:¹

• Injunction. Defendants 1-25, 37 and 38, and anyone acting through them, were restrained from using the plaintiff's name, voice, manner of singing, image, signature or persona for commercial or personal gain without his consent. The restraint covers AI voice models, voice conversion tools, deepfakes, face morphing and GIFs. SpicyIP adds that it extends to physical, digital and metaverse media.⁵
• Dynamic character. The court said that the injunction may operate as a dynamic injunction (para 22).
• Domain names. Defendants 26, 27 and 30 must lock or suspend arijitsingh.com and arijitsingh.in and allow no transfer to third parties until the next hearing.
• Takedown. Defendants 1-37 were asked to take down the infringing URLs listed in the plaintiff's Exhibit "X". For Defendants 1, 2 and 7 the court declined to order full takedown of five YouTube videos. Instead they must edit, delete or remove every reference to the plaintiff's name, voice, image and likeness.
• Disclosure. Defendants 33-36 must disclose particulars of the merchandise sellers (Defendants 11-23), and the domain registrars (Defendants 26-31) must disclose registrant details. Defendants 26-36 must comply within two weeks of service and cooperate with the plaintiff.
• Service and variation. Compliance with Order XXXIX Rule 3 CPC may be done by email, with speed post where postal addresses exist. Defendants may seek variation on at least seven clear working days' notice.

The plaintiff was also allowed to amend the plaint within two weeks.¹

The order does not rely on any AI-specific statute, because India has none. It places AI voice cloning inside the existing personality-rights doctrine, treating a singer's voice as one of the attributes that make up a protectable persona. The ruling therefore turns on identifiability, goodwill and commercial gain, rather than on how the cloning technology works. It reaches tool providers as well as users: platforms that supply voice-conversion tools and datasets are restrained directly, and so are creators of tutorials on how to use them.¹

The order also marks out what it leaves undecided. It does not rule on moral rights under Section 38-B, and it does not analyse whether using a singer's recordings to train a voice model is itself copyright infringement. SpicyIP's commentary asks how courts will treat parody and remixes, how responsibility should be assessed when an infringing output is a by-product of how an AI system works, and what standard would apply to non-famous people whose voices are cloned. It notes that the court uses "personality rights" and "right to publicity" as if they were separate concepts without explaining the difference, and it observes that the main dispute over personality and moral rights remained unresolved at this stage.⁵⁶

SpicyIP also reports criticisms made by lawyer Ameet Datta: that the suit leans mainly on publicity rights, that it is unclear how the plaintiff can claim in respect of 456 songs when the performer does not retain copyright in the recordings, and that the court did not look closely at why such different defendants were joined in a single suit. The same commentary points to the Beijing Internet Court's June 2024 ruling on AI voice replication as a comparison, and to US state laws such as Tennessee's ELVIS Act.⁶

The Arijit Singh order became a reference point for later AI personality-rights orders. In September 2025 the Bombay High Court cited it when granting Asha Bhosle relief against an AI company offering cloned versions of her voice, repeating the proposition that making AI tools available to convert any voice into a celebrity's voice without permission would violate personality rights.⁸ In October 2025 plaintiff's counsel cited it in the Bombay High Court suits of Akshay Kumar (Akshay Hari Om Bhatia) and Suniel Shetty. The Akshay Kumar order cites it as 2024 SCC OnLine Bom 2445 (paras 16-18) but records it only as part of the plaintiff's submissions and does not analyse it.⁷

The Delhi High Court's orders for Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff and the Bachchan family protect the same attributes, and the Arijit Singh order itself cites Delhi authority. Together they form the wave of orders described in the overview entry on AI personality rights.

The suit remains pending, and the ex parte ad-interim injunction was continued in later hearings. On 2 September 2024 Justice Chagla could not take up the daily board for want of time and stood the matter over to 27 September 2024, with earlier ad-interim relief continuing.² On 22 January 2026 Justice Sharmila U. Deshmukh took up the interim application, together with an application by Defendant No. 35 (Interim Application (L) No. 1389 of 2026), on mentioning, adjourned the matter to 4 March 2026 and directed that the affidavit-in-reply be filed on or before 16 February 2026. That order records no decree, settlement or merits finding.³

As of 15 October 2026, no order later than 22 January 2026 has been verified for this entry, so the outcome of the interim application and any final decree are not recorded here.