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OK! Smashes Hello In Final Appeal On Douglas-Zeta Jones Wedding Pictures

Britain’s highest appeal court has ruled that people can sell exclusive publication rights to their personal events, and if a competitor breaches those rights then they’ll have to pay the financial penalty.

In 2000 Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones sold exclusive rights to their New York wedding for £1 million ($2 million, €1.5 million) to the UK’s OK! Magazine. But arch-rival Hello Magazine managed to buy some unofficial pictures for £125,000 ($250,000, €185,000), apparently taken by a gatecrasher, and in typical UK spoiler style Hello splashed those grainy photos, ruining OK! Magazine’s exclusive.

The Douglases and OK! sued Hello in the UK High Court, and in 2003 OK! won £1 million ($2 million, €1.5 million) damages although the Douglases were only awarded £14,500 ($29,000, €22,000). Hello appealed, and the Appeals Court ruled in 2005 in its favor while maintaining the £14,500 award to the Douglases. So OK! then appealed to the country’s highest Law Court, The House of Lords, and the Law Lords, by the slimmest of margins, 3-2, have now ruled the original High Court judgment was correct.

OK!, therefore, gets its £1 million damages and the Douglases still end up with only £14,500 (the reason they didn’t get much is because their authorized photos were published so the court believed there was little mental pain from having the public see the unofficial pictures, although Catherine Zeta-Jones took umbrage to one of the Hello pictures showing her husband feeding her wedding cake with a spoon. Not flattering, apparently.  The Douglases did not participate in the House of Lords appeal. Their legal fees to win £14,500 are said to have been around £1 million.  

UK lawyers are now saying that the media now has to be careful how it practices the “spoiler” game from this point on. If exclusive rights are sold to a “private” event, publishing unofficial pictures taken at the event are now not on, according to the Law Lords. decision.

Hello got off lucky in one respect. Many times in UK civil cases the losing party has to pay the costs for the winner as well as themselves and in this case legal fees are thought to have been around £8 million ($16 million, €12 million). But the Law Lords ruled that Hello’s spoiler did not damage OK!’s business so both sides have to split the costs. – May 3, 2007

Keywords:celebrities in court,tabloid press

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