Identity Crisis in an Age of Digital Replication – Critical Analysis of Personality Rights in India

Abstract

Identity was once anchored in presence. It required a body, a voice, a moment that could be located in time. That assumption no longer holds with the same certainty. Digital systems now allow identity to be replicated, altered, and circulated in ways that detach it from the individual who originally embodied it. This paper examines the evolving contours of personality rights in a landscape where identity is no longer stable, singular, or entirely controllable. The focus remains on the uneasy intersection of privacy, property, and dignity, though these categories begin to blur once technological realities are taken seriously.
The analysis moves across jurisdictions, particularly India, the United States, and Europe, not to produce a neat comparison but to observe how each system responds sometimes decisively, sometimes hesitantly to similar pressures. Judicial decisions are read alongside theoretical approaches, and the gaps between them become difficult to ignore. There are moments where the law appears confident in recognising personality as a protectable interest. Then a new form of digital replication emerges, and that confidence weakens.
A purely proprietary understanding risks reducing identity to a tradable asset, while a strictly privacy-based model struggles to account for economic exploitation. What begins to surface instead is a hybrid structure, though it is rarely acknowledged as such in explicit terms. This paper argues that personality rights must be reconceptualised as a composite right grounded in dignity but responsive to technological and commercial realities. Whether existing legal frameworks can sustain that shift remains uncertain. The question lingers quietly, but persistently.