I like lawyers. They always smile, even when they’re not actually billing you.
Big hats off to Andy Scott of the LSE’s law department for bringing together a terrific cast of what we in journalism would - rather unimaginatively - call “top lawyers.”
It was Chatham House rules, but the lawyers thought:
- David Eady is waging a one-judge privacy campaign based on Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights trumping Article 10
- Privacy needs parliamentary intervention
- Privacy damages remain minimal
- CFAs (No win, no fee) haven’t increased libel actions and the cost of insurance premiums (in case poorer claimants lose) still restricts access to justice
- A sense of growing ‘opportunities’ in copyright and privacy
- A dissatisfaction with the slowness of the whole process
Lawyers didn’t talk about:
- Pre-emptive injunctions
- Possible US Free Speech Protection Act
- Weren’t interested in ISPs, Google and Yahoo
- Weren’t very interested in ‘freedom of speech’ issues
- Mainly saw regulation of journalism as an ‘old media’ issue involving revelations over the private lives of celebrities, politicians, etc.
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