The Mail On Sunday must publish a front page statement about Meghan Markle’s victory in her copyright claim against the newspaper over the publication of a “personal and private” letter to her estranged father, the High Court has ruled.
The statement font size should be no smaller than the front page headline “Meghan’s shattering letter to her father” published on 10 February 2019, the judge ordered.
Associated Newspapers Limited, the publisher of The Mail On Sunday and Mail Online, has also been ordered to print a notice on page five of the paper stating it “infringed her copyright” by publishing parts of the letter sent to Thomas Markle.
In a ruling on Friday, Lord Justice Warby also granted Meghan a declaration that ANL “misused her private information and infringed her copyright”.
Related
The duchess, 39, sued ANL over a series of articles which reproduced parts of a “heartfelt” letter to Mr Markle, 76, in August 2018.
She claimed the five articles published in February 2019 involved a misuse of her private information, breached her copyright and breached the Data Protection Act.
Last month, Meghan was granted summary judgment in relation to her privacy claim, meaning she won that part of the case without having to go to trial, as well as most of her copyright claim.
Content from our partners
At a remote hearing this week, ANL’s lawyers applied for permission to appeal against that ruling on ten grounds.
But Lord Justice Warby refused permission to appeal, saying it had “no real prospect” of success.
In his ruling on Friday, Lord Justice Warby explained he “did not consider that there is any real prospect that the Court of Appeal would reach a different conclusion as to the outcome of the claim for misuse of private information, or as to the issues I decided in the copyright claim”.
The judge said he would order ANL to publish a notice about Meghan’s victory as it would have “genuine utility”.
He added: “The defendant devoted a very considerable amount of space to the infringing articles, which it continued to publish for over two years.
“It has devoted a very considerable number of further column inches, and many hundreds if not thousands of words, to coverage of earlier stages of this litigation and commentary upon them.
“The wording sought is modest by comparison, and factual in nature.
“But I am not persuaded of the case for prolonged publication.”
The judge ordered that The Mail On Sunday must print “on a single occasion a statement on the front page”, which refers readers to a further statement on page three of the newspaper.
The statement will read: “The court has given judgment for the Duchess of Sussex on her claim for copyright infringement.
“The court found that Associated Newspapers infringed her copyright by publishing extracts of her handwritten letter to her father in The Mail On Sunday and in Mail Online.
“There will be a trial of the remedies to which the duchess is entitled, at which the court will decide whether the duchess is the exclusive owner of copyright in all parts of the letter, or whether any other person owns a share.”
Lord Justice Warby also ordered ANL to publish the statement on Mail Online “for a period of one week” with a hyperlink to his full judgment.
The judge added: “In my judgment, these are measured incursions into the defendant’s freedom to decide what it publishes and does not publish, that are justified in pursuit of the legitimate aim I have identified, and proportionate to that aim.
“They will involve little if any additional expense, and certainly nothing approaching the scale of the expense that has been lavished on this litigation.”
A Mail on Sunday spokesperson said: “We will be applying to the Court of Appeal for permission to appeal, including in relation to aspects of the judgment today.”
In the ruling last month, the judge said publication of Meghan’s letter to her father was “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful”.
He said: “It was, in short, a personal and private letter.
“The majority of what was published was about the claimant’s own behaviour, her feelings of anguish about her father’s behaviour, as she saw it, and the resulting rift between them.
“These are inherently private and personal matters.”
He said “the only tenable justification for any such interference was to correct some inaccuracies about the letter”, contained in an article in People magazine, published just days before ANL’s five articles, which featured an interview with five friends of Meghan.
But the judge added: “The inescapable conclusion is that, save to the very limited extent I have identified, the disclosures made were not a necessary or proportionate means of serving that purpose.
“For the most part they did not serve that purpose at all.
“Taken as a whole the disclosures were manifestly excessive and hence unlawful.”
He also said ANL’s arguments on ownership of the copyright of the letter “seem to me to occupy the shadowland between improbability and unreality”.
Picture: Chris Jackson/PA Wire
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
