Paying for An Exclusive Doesn’t Necessarily Mean It Stays Exclusive.
UK Appeals Court OK!s Spoilers.

Philip M. Stone May 19, 2005

It was the celebrity wedding of 2000 – Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones in a lavish, $1.5 million to $2 million New York Plaza Hotel ceremony attended by 250 guests. And the UK’s OK! Magazine paid £1 million for exclusive photo rights. So rival Hello Magazine did the traditional thing and ran a “spoiler” – printing some unauthorized pictures taken by a wedding guest and the Douglasses and OK! sued.

In a 2003 trial, Michael and Catherine both testified how hurt they were at Hello’s actions, and the court awarded  £1 million in damages to OK! and another  £1 million for legal fees. But the Court of Appeals this week threw out those judgments, declaring open season for more such spoilers.

OK! said it will appeal the decision to the UK’s highest court, the House of Lords. “This decision will impact all publishers with exclusive rights as it means rivals will be free to run spoilers with no redress in law,” according to a statement from Northern and Shell which publishes OK!.

Hello had paid £125,000 for six grainy images of the wedding taken by a British photographer who gate crashed the wedding with a hidden camera.

 Spoilers have a long tradition in Fleet Street. As soon as a rival newspaper finds out a competitor has an exclusive it will do all it can to run some sort of material on that same story to prove it had the story, too. To combat that some newspapers have held back their exclusives from early editions to give their rivals as little time as possible to catch up.

While Hello may be happy to be saving £2 million, it has also opened itself up to the same type of treatment that it dished out to OK!. Hello often pays huge amounts of money for exclusives, and now that the court has basically ruled that spoilers are OK there is no guarantee it will get its money worth in the future.

The Appeals court accepted the damages awarded to Michael and Catherine of just £14,600 but turned down their request for more. That £14,600 is said to have cost the Douglasses some £3 million in legal fees, but one should not feel too sorry for them – Catherine said in her testimony in 2003 that £1 million wasn’t very much money to her.

Lord Phillips explained that the Hello unauthorized photos “invaded the area of privacy which the Douglasses had chosen to retain. But it was the Douglasses, not OK! who had the right to protect this area of privacy of confidentiality.”

In explaining why the Douglasses were not getting increased damages, the judge said that while it was proper for people to authorize pictures of private occasions to be made public, and that unauthorized pictures could cause distress, the fact that there was publication of authorized pictures reduced that stress and that should be reflected in award damages.

That’s a coded message to newspapers that even if they do fall afoul of the privacy provisions it will cost just tens of thousands of pounds in damages and not six or seven figures partly because of the revenues received for the authorized pictures.

OK! Is said to have paid in excess of £1 million for exclusive coverage of the upcoming marriage of English personality Jordan. Reports say a special security force will be employed to ensure no guest can smuggle a camera into the ceremony.

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