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Synopsis

Late Bollywood Actor Sushant Singh Rajput’s father on Thursday moved the Delhi High Court against an order refusing to restrain the continued online streaming of the movie ‘Nyay: The Justice’, based on his son's life.

The division bench of Justices Yashwant Varma and Dharmesh Sharma issued notice to several people, including the filmmakers, against whom the late actor's father Krishna Kishore Singh has alleged that they are taking "unfair commercial advantage" of his deceased son's life.

The court has posted the matter for further consideration on November 16, 2023.

The movie was released on the OTT platform Lapalap in June 2021, a year after SSR's demise. SSR was found dead in his apartment in Mumbai's suburban Bandra on June 14, 2020.

Notably, on July 11, a single judge bench of Justice C. Hari Shankar said that the actor's publicity and privacy rights were not heritable and had ended with his demise. While dismissing a plea filed by Krishna Kishore Singh, Sushant’s father, the single-judge bench had said, “To fasten a legal right, on something as fleeting as a celebrity, appears to be an oxymoron”. “Law cannot allow itself to be a vehicle to promote celebrity culture”, he added.

"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," the court had observed.

The court had said that all rights infractions, that the plaintiff alleged in the plaint, were not his, but SSR’s. SSR is no more and the rights themselves are not heritable, the court had held.

On the concept of ‘celebrity rights’, the single-judge bench had said, “The concept of celebrity rights, as a distinct compendium of rights available only to celebrities is, legally, I must confess, completely unacceptable to me”.

“Celebrities, oftentimes, spring into being overnight, and vanish from the public eye just as quickly. Who can forget Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, the child actors who played the young lead performers in the celebrated ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ who, after an evening of glory, were found to have returned to the Mumbai slums, enmeshed in a spate of controversies? To fasten a legal right on something as fleeting as celebrity status, to my mind, appears an oxymoron”, the court had stated in its 68-page order.

Case Title: Krishna Kishore Singh v. Sarla A Saraogi & Ors.