Privacy tort
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Saturday, December 12th, 2009Tiger Woods has obtained an injunction against the publication of some private details in the UK. Media lawyer Mark Stephens suggests that it concerns information that’s being freely reported in the US. If that’s so, the injunction seems futile, and therefore legally unjustifiable. It also seems strategically dopey. It can only serve to achieve something I had thought impossible: […]
Trivia question for privacy law geeks
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009No doubt you’ve heard of the famous 1890 Harvard Law Review article “The Right to Privacy” by Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis, which paved the way for the privacy tort in the US and has been described as the “most influential law review article of all”. But do you know what they wrote before that? […]
Privacy and reputation
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009Two interesting developments in the tug-of-war between privacy and defamation. The first comes in a UK injunction case. Justice Tugendhat granted an injunction to a celebrity of some sort (or at least, someone with “some public reputation”) restraining the publication of information about his encounters at his home with a prostitute some ten years ago. […]
Secret judgment lifts lid on other secret judgment
Friday, July 31st, 2009You might have missed it, but last week news emerged that Kirstin Dunne-Powell has obtained an injunction against Tony Veitch to prevent him publicly disclosing private and confidential material about her. Apparently she filed for the injunction shortly after Veitch pleaded guilty, back in April. That evening, Veitch had told Close Up that he “did […]
Minister in breach of privacy laws?
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009Did Paula Bennett’s release of her critics’ benefit details breach privacy laws? My VUW law school colleague Dr Nicole Moreham thinks it might have. UPDATE: Paula Bennett was squirming under Mary Wilson’s skewer on Checkpoint last night, simultaneously trying to insist that she had done the right thing in “getting the facts out there” and […]
Blogger busted
Sunday, July 12th, 2009A British detective blogging about police issues under the pseudonym “NightJack” has failed in his attempt to stop the Times from revealing his identity. The ruling suggests that anonymous bloggers don’t have a reasonable expectation that their identities will be kept private. Well, those who are breaching police regulations in writing their blog, anyway. But […]
Muckhacking
Friday, July 10th, 2009For anyone who’s missed it: a fascinating expose of journalistic practices at News of the World. They hire private investigators to illegally hack public figures’ mobile phones; try to pass it off as a one-off lapse by a rogue journalist if caught out; and if sued pay out enormous sums as hush money in confidential […]
Law Commission goes all social networky
Monday, June 22nd, 2009And you thought they were geeks. Bzzzzt. The Law Commission has launched an interactive website called “TalkLaw” for us to have our say on law reform issues. (I did a couple of holiday stints at the Law Commission in the early 90s, and they were throwing around a similar idea then – but it was […]
Law Commission paper on privacy
Monday, March 9th, 2009The Law Commission has released yet another paper on privacy. “These are big issues and they are hard,” says Commission president Sir Geoffrey Palmer. 300 pages big and hard, in fact, building on 2008’s 222-page paper “Privacy: concepts and issues” (discussed here), 2007’s 76-page “A conceptual approach to privacy” by Mark Hickford, and that’s not counting […]
Children’s privacy marches on in ECHR
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009The European Court of Human Rights has gone much further than NZ’s Hosking case in protecting children’s privacy. Parents of a newborn baby snapped by a private clinic in its sterile unit successfully argued that the taking (and keeping) of the photos (even without publication) without parental consent breached the child’s right to private life. This […]
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