Hugh Grant (Photo: Getty Images)As this blog has previously set out, there is actually no such thing in England and Wales as a single "law of privacy".
By this I mean that there is no free-standing general right of legal action to protect privacy against any and all threatened and actual intrusions. Instead, there is a bundle of civil and criminal laws relating to privacy which, when taken together, constitute the laws of privacy; just as a range of specific laws from copyright to patents constitute the laws of intellectual property.
Some of these privacy laws are common law (or "judge-made"), most notably the laws of confidentiality and the misuse of private information, and such judge-made law always risks being dismissed as by "unelected judges".
Many of our privacy laws are on a statutory basis: blackmail under the Theft Act, the Data Protection Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and, often overlooked, the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. It under this last Act that the interesting judgment was published today on the privacy of Hugh Grant's daughter and her mother.
The short judgment is sobering reading for anyone concerned with the modern practices of the tabloid press and of those who get stories and photographs for them. The two claimants are the mother of Hugh Grant's child, and the daughter. The judge details the evidence put before him:...read more
By this I mean that there is no free-standing general right of legal action to protect privacy against any and all threatened and actual intrusions. Instead, there is a bundle of civil and criminal laws relating to privacy which, when taken together, constitute the laws of privacy; just as a range of specific laws from copyright to patents constitute the laws of intellectual property.
Some of these privacy laws are common law (or "judge-made"), most notably the laws of confidentiality and the misuse of private information, and such judge-made law always risks being dismissed as by "unelected judges".
Many of our privacy laws are on a statutory basis: blackmail under the Theft Act, the Data Protection Act, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and, often overlooked, the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. It under this last Act that the interesting judgment was published today on the privacy of Hugh Grant's daughter and her mother.
The short judgment is sobering reading for anyone concerned with the modern practices of the tabloid press and of those who get stories and photographs for them. The two claimants are the mother of Hugh Grant's child, and the daughter. The judge details the evidence put before him:...read more
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/11/claimant-mother-photographers
