Magazine wins appeal over Douglas-Zeta-Jones photo rights
LONDON (AFP) — Celebrity magazine OK! won an appeal Wednesday in a long-running legal battle with rival weekly “Hello” over wedding pictures of Hollywood super-couple Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
The House of Lords, Britain’s highest court of appeal, backed OK!’s right to protect its one million US dollar deal with the couple for exclusive photographs of their November 2000 wedding at New York’s Plaza Hotel.
But the Law Lords ordered the two publications to share the 8 million pounds legal costs, ruling that OK!’s business has not been harmed by Hello’s publication of so-called spoiler pictures.
Hello! secretly took pictures of their New York wedding in November 2000, despite the deal under which OK! had paid one million dollars for exclusive pictures of the Plaza Hotel ceremony.
In Wednesday’s ruling, three out of five Law Lords found in OK!’s favour over confidentiality of their exclusive deal with the Douglases.
Media lawyers had said beforehand that if OK! won by successfully arguing there was a right of confidentiality, then a new law protecting a person’s image would be created in Britain.
A lawyer for Hello! magazine lamented the ruling, saying it would give celebrities “a completely new right which will allow (them) to control the information that the general public see about them.”
“Undoubtedly if one magazine or media outlet has paid enough for an event, what the House of Lords are saying … is that they will protect that and that any information that doesn’t form part of the exclusive will be banned and will not be able to be published,” he told BBC News 24.
Zeta Jones told the 2003 High Court hearing she felt “devastated, shocked and appalled” when she realized unauthorized photographers had gatecrashed her high-security wedding.
© 2007 AFP
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