Along with the civil courts, Inforrm is taking a winter break for a few weeks to allow the editorial team to relax. We will have a some occasional posts over the next fortnight but the full normal service will not be resumed until the second week of January 2016.
The past twelve months have seen some important media case law. In 2015 the English courts began in earnest the slow process of interpreting the often obscure provisions of the Defamation Act 2013. We draw attention, in particular, to the cases of Lachaux (section 1) and Ahuja (section 9). The most important cases of the year were perhaps Vidal-Hall (data protection) and Gulati (privacy damages). There were also important decisions from the long dormant Investigatory Powers Tribunal which at least chipped away at the edges of state surveillance.
It has also been another great year for views and posts on the Inforrm blog. We have had nearly 700,000 page views this year, more than half from the UK with the United States, Australia, Hong Kong and Ireland making up the rest of the top five. We have had over 500 posts this year on a very wide variety of media and legal topics from authors from all areas of media law and all round the world.
Many thanks to all our readers for following the blog and our twitter feed. And thank you for the many positive comments we have had (and the constructive negative ones). Thanks also to everyone who has written for the blog in the past year.
As we have said many times before, Inforrm is intended to be a forum for debate and we welcome contributions from all points of view about issues concerning “media and law”. We can be contacted via the email address on the home page.
The top 10 posts of 2015 were by 10 authors and were as follows (in descending order)
- The Perils of “Revenge Porn” – Alex Cochrane
- Will the tort of misuse of private information disappear if the Human Rights Act is repealed? – Hugh Tomlinson QC
- Case Law: Gulati v MGN Ltd, A landmark decision on the quantum of privacy damages – Hugh Tomlinson QC and Sara Mansoori
- How to avoid defamation – Steven Price
- Defamation Act 2013: Does section 1 replace the test of the hypothetical reasonable reader by that of the twitter troll? Part 1 – Adrienne Page QC
- Case Law: OPO v James Rhodes (formerly MLA): Pianist’s book unbanned, no intention to cause distress – Dan Tench
- Case Law: Mosley v Google Inc, Data Protection claim against Google to go to trial – Lorna Skinner
- Privacy Issues in New Zealand: Sex with the Office Lights on – Nicole Moreham
- Case Law: Vidal-Hall v Google, Distress damages can be awarded under s 13 DPA without pecuniary loss (and misuse of private information is a tort) – Lorna Skinner
- Case Law, Strasbourg: Delfi AS v. Estonia, Grand Chamber confirms liability of online news portal for offensive comments posted by its readers – Dirk Voorhoof
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