Meghan Markle has won a legal battle against the Mail on Sunday after a court ruled that the newspaper had “infringed on her copyright” by publishing a “personal and private letter”.
The Duchess of Sussex sued Associated Newspapers – who owns the British tabloid – for breach of copyright after the paper published a five-page letter addressed to her father, Thomas Markle, in February 2019.
Lawyers acting on behalf of the Duchess of Sussex said the printing of the letter was “unnecessary” and was “intended more as a species of punishment or retribution, rather than as a necessary and proportionate measure in the interests of the claimant or the public”.
Agreeing with Ms Markle, Judge Justice Warby said the publication of Meghan’s letter to her father was “manifestly excessive and hence unlawful”, adding that the Mail on Sunday articles “copied a large and important proportion of the work’s original literary content”.
“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,” said the Judge in his ruling.
While agreeing that the Mail on Sunday did infringe on her copyright, Justice Warby said a separate copyright claim still needs to be resolved, with a new hearing set to go ahead this March.
The claim will look at whether Ms Markle was the “sole author” of the work, or whether Jason Knauf, the former communications secretary to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, was a “co-author”.
The newspaper has been ordered to publish a front-page apology and pay £450,000 in costs.
Commenting on the victory, Ms Markle said: “We all lose when misinformation sells more than truth, when moral exploitation sells more than decency and when companies create their business model to profit from people’s pain. But, for today, with this comprehensive win on both privacy and copyright, we have all won.
“We now know, and hope it creates legal precedent, that you cannot take somebody’s privacy and exploit it in a privacy case, as the defendant has blatantly done over the past two years.”
The Mail on Sunday said: “We are disappointed with the judge’s decision not to allow the privacy case to be determined at trial and by his refusal of leave to appeal.
“We will be applying to the Court of Appeal for permission to appeal in relation to his decisions on both the privacy and copyright claims.”
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