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Amitabh Bachchan Wins Personality Protection
The Delhi High Court awarded Amitabh Bachchan interim protection for his personality rights:
Mr. Bachchan apparently has a personality worth protecting:
The court barred not just identified entities from using Bachchan's persona, without his consent, but also passed a John Doe order, or an order against world-at-large, from infringing his personality rights. The lawsuit before the court flagged Bachchan's name, voice, images, pictures, likeness and his "unique style of dialogue delivery" among the traits which fall under legal protection. Counsel for the actor told the court that mobile applications, telephone numbers and websites had mushroomed that monetized his images or likeness without permission. "Personality right is a strong right to enforce for persons with high level of identifiability and strength of association," said Eashan Ghosh, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property rights. "Both these factors hold true for Amitabh Bachchan."
This would seem to protect Mr. Bachchan from a number of science fictional futures, including, but not limited to, Frank Herbert's ego-likenesses from Dune (1964) and recorded personalities from Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).
Poul Anderson described a system for transferring personality in his 1974 story The Voortrekkers, published in Final Stage: The Ultimate Science Fiction Anthology published by Charterhouse:
“Turning human beings into robots. Not exactly like Columbus, is it? Though I grant you, thinkers always did point out how machine-like the astronauts were ... and are.”
“If you please,” the spokesman repeated, “value judgments aside, who’s talking about making robots out of humans? Brains transplanted into machinery? Come! If a body couldn’t survive the trip, why imagine that a brain in a tank might? No, we’ll simply employ ultra-sophisticated computer-sensor-effector systems.”
“With human minds.”
“With human psychoneural patterns mapped in, sir. That is all.” Smugly: “True, that’s a mighty big ‘all.’ The pattern of an individual is complex beyond imagination, and dynamic rather than static; our math boys call it n-dimensional. We will have to develop methods for scanning it without harm to the subject, recording it, and transferring it to a different matrix, whether that matrix be photonic-electronic or molecular-organic.” Drawing breath, then portentously: “Consider the benefits, right here on Earth, of having such a capability.”
“I don’t know about that,” said the commentator. “Maybe you could plant a copy of my personality somewhere else; but I’d go on in this same old body, wouldn’t I?”
“It would hardly be your exact personality anyhow,” admitted the spokesman. “The particular matrix would ... um ... determine so much of the functioning. The important thing, from the viewpoint of extrasolar exploration, is that this will give us machines which are not mere robots, but which have such human qualities as motivation and self-programming.
“At the same time, they’ll have the advantages of robots. For example, they can be switched off in transit; they won’t experience those empty years between stars; they’ll arrive sane.”
Just for fun, I have to include this clip of Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher describing the effects of Lucasfilm's ownership of her likeness on her life:
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 2/25/2023)
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