The Hindu : International / Globescan : Hello! wins court appeal on photos

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 20, 2005

International

International - Globescan

Hello! wins court appeal on photos

Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones

LONDON: A British court has overturned a ruling ordering celebrity magazine Hello! to pay more than £2 millions to a rival for printing unauthorised photos of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones. Three Court of Appeal judges backed the magazine's challenge to a lower court's order that it pay more than £1 million in damages and another £1 million in legal costs to rival magazine OK!, which had an exclusive contract with the Hollywood couple to cover their New York wedding. But the judges upheld the High Court's 2003 ruling that Hello! had breached the couple's commercial confidentiality by publishing secretly snapped photos of their November 2000 wedding. Mr. Douglas and Ms. Zeta-Jones had signed an exclusive deal with OK! for rights to pictures of the nuptials at New York's Plaza Hotel. During a dramatic six-week hearing in 2003, Ms. Zeta-Jones said she had felt ``violated'' when Hello! published its ``sleazy and unflattering'' pictures. She singled out an image that showed Mr. Douglas feeding her wedding cake, saying ``I don't usually like my husband shoving a spoon down my throat to be photographed.'' In its appeal, the magazine argued that it had run its own wedding pictures as a ``spoiler'' to its rival's coverage — a common practice in journalism. — AP

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