Amber Melville-Brown navigates a strange new world for media lawyers
The game of King Canute is not one that the Court of Appeal was happy to play in PJS v News Group (celebrity injunction) . In the first verse of what is becoming a fairly lengthy legal ballad, the court had previously overturned a first instance decision and required that the privacy and the identity of the individuals concerned in this now highly publicised privacy case be preserved. But come verse two, and the court discharged its previously ordered privacy injunction; not because it considered that the privacy rights of the claimant were outweighed by the free speech rights of the defendant, but because the private information was now so widely talked about that it was hardly private at all (see [2016] EWCA Civ 393).
A tide of private information about the couple crashed onto our shores, in publications from over the borders in Scotland and Ireland and the US; and the Supreme Court, now asked to consider the issue, will presumably have felt similarly engulfed.
Choppy media waters
In PJS
