Delhi High Court grants ex-parte injunction shielding boAt co-founder Aman Gupta from deepfakes, merch and impersonation

Justice Tushar Rao Gedela has restrained 45 named and unknown defendants and directed Meta, YouTube and X to take down 73 listed URLs, after the Shark Tank India judge complained of unauthorised merchandise, AI chatbots impersonating him, deepfake pornography and fake booking listings.

The Delhi High Court has restrained 45 named and unidentified defendants from commercially exploiting the name, image, voice and registered slogans of boAt co-founder and Shark Tank India judge Aman Gupta, in an ex-parte ad-interim order that also directs Meta, YouTube and X to take down 73 specific URLs and to hand over user data tied to a set of impugned profiles. The order, passed by Justice Tushar Rao Gedela on 7 May 2026 in CS(COMM) 462/2026, is one of the most expansive personality-rights injunctions any Indian High Court has issued so far, sweeping in deepfake pornography, AI chatbots, merchandise sellers and contact-aggregator platforms in a single sitting.

Mr Gupta, a chartered accountant who co-founded Imagine Marketing (which owns the boAt audio brand) and now runs a new venture called OFF/BEAT, told the Court that an entire ecosystem of unauthorised use had built up around his on-screen persona. The plaint catalogued listings on celebrity-booking sites that offered him for paid speaking engagements; T-shirts, fridge magnets and rakhis carrying his face and his registered slogans “Hum Bhi Bana Lenge” and “DOWN, BUT NOT OUT!”; Telegram chatbots imitating both him and boAt employees; deepfake pornographic videos hosted on adult sites; GIF and sticker libraries on Tenor and Giphy; and his contact details listed on B2B prospecting tools such as ContactOut, RocketReach, EasyLeadz and RapidKings.

A personality, a trademark, and seventy-three URLs

Senior Advocate Diya Kapur, appearing for Mr Gupta, pressed the case on three legal tracks at once. The first was the registered trademarks — “Hum Bhi Bana Lenge” (No. 5764901) and “DOWN, BUT NOT OUT!” (No. 5764905), both registered in Class 25 (clothing) and Class 41 (entertainment services). The second was the unregistered but distinct bundle of personality and publicity rights — the face built up across five seasons on Shark Tank India, around 1.7 million Instagram followers on the @boatxman handle, three million on LinkedIn and a substantial broader media footprint. The third was the right to privacy under Article 21, invoked specifically to deal with sexually explicit and deepfake content.

To convert this into actionable relief, the plaintiff handed up Annexure-A — a list of 73 URLs, broken down by infringement category. The structure of the list mattered: it pinned the order to specific web addresses rather than to a general direction to act against “all infringing content”, which has been a vulnerability in earlier personality-rights orders.

What the Court found prima facie

Justice Gedela treated the volume and variety of the documented misuse as itself probative. Booking listings, merchandise, AI chatbots, deepfake pornography, sticker monetisation and contact harvesting, he held, “positively assert the underlying fact” that the plaintiff's exclusive personality attributes were being misappropriated for commercial gain. On that footing, prima facie infringement of both the registered marks and the personality and publicity rights was made out, and the balance of convenience and irreparable injury followed almost automatically given the deepfake material.

The Court treated the sexually explicit and AI-generated deepfake content as a distinct head requiring “immediate and urgent consideration”, separately from the wider personality-rights debate. The only plausible motive behind such material, the judge observed, was unlawful financial gain producing unjust enrichment — a framing that allowed the Court to skip prolonged inquiry into commercial harm and move directly to restraint.

On Section 12A of the Commercial Courts Act, 2015, the Court accepted the plaintiff's submission that the urgent interim relief sought brought the matter within the carve-out recognised by the Supreme Court in Yamini Manohar v. T.K.D. Keerthi, (2024) 5 SCC 815. Pre-institution mediation was accordingly dispensed with. Exemption from court fees was granted with a four-week window to make good the deficit, and leave was given under Section 151 CPC to file a longer-than-usual list of dates and synopsis. Additional documents could be placed on record under Order XI Rule 1(5) CPC read with the Delhi High Court (Original Side) Rules, 2018.

How the order tries to keep up with the internet

The more interesting design choices sit in the enforcement architecture rather than the headline restraint. The Court built three escalation tracks so the order can move with the infringement rather than freeze on the day of pronouncement. First, the plaintiff may intimate further infringing URLs to the intermediary defendants — Meta, YouTube and X — with supporting evidence, on which the platforms are to act forthwith. Any impediment is to be brought back to the Court. Second, for fresh infringers altogether, the plaintiff may move the Joint Registrar (Judicial) under Order I Rule 10 CPC for impleadment. Third, extending the operative injunction to those newly impleaded defendants requires a fresh application before the Court itself.

A safety valve protects the rest of the web. Any website that finds itself swept up in a block but which is not primarily an infringer may approach the Court on an undertaking to seek modification. The structure tries to combine reach with proportionality — broad enough to chase a moving target, narrow enough to be undone in individual cases.

The platform defendants did not contest the urgent relief stage. Counsel for X Corp and for Google/YouTube undertook to act on the Annexure-A list and reserved their merits position for the written statement. The Union of India appeared through Central Government Standing Counsel but recorded no opposition at the ad-interim stage.

Outcome

Defendants 1 and 6 to 45, and anyone acting on their behalf, are restrained from using Mr Gupta's name, likeness, image, voice, photographs, videos, GIFs or contact details, including any content generated by AI or deepfake tools, without his express written authorisation. The same defendants are restrained from infringing the two registered trademarks and from passing off goods or services as his. Defendants 34, 35 and 43 — operators of goindian.net, sexcelebrity.net and a flagged search-result page — are specifically restrained from hosting obscene, pornographic, morphed or deepfake material depicting the plaintiff.

Meta/Instagram, YouTube/Google and X are directed to take down the 73 URLs in Annexure-A and to disclose mobile numbers, user IDs and email addresses associated with the profiles tied to Defendants 29 to 39 and Defendant 43. Notice is issued, with replies due within four weeks of service and rejoinders two weeks thereafter. Compliance with Order XXXIX Rule 3 CPC is to be effected within ten days. The matter is listed before the Joint Registrar (Judicial) on 3 August 2026 for completion of service and pleadings, and before the Court on 1 October 2026.