It was Victorian newspaper editor William Thomas Stead who pioneered the combination of moral outrage and prurience that’s still found on London newsstands 130 years later. When he ‘bought’ a 13-year-old prostitute and printed a series of articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, the paper quickly sold out and copies were traded for 20-times their original value. Stead was later imprisoned for abduction.

Stead’s critics called him a pornographer. His supporters said he was carrying out a public service in exposing injustice.

The modern version of that debate puts laws protecting an individual’s right to privacy in conflict with the public’s interest in freedom of speech. The argument has proved especially fraught in the U.K., with its aggressive press and strict laws.

“A lot of privacy law - and newspaper regulation in general - was dreamt up in a bygone age,” De Groote said.

State Secrets

In 2011, Manchester United soccer star Ryan Giggs won a so-called “super-injunction” barring reporting of his affair with a reality television star or any discussion of the court order. The injunction was lifted in 2012 after a lawmaker, John Hemming, said his name in Parliament, where speech is protected, enabling the press to publish it.

“I am sad that the Supreme Court have decided that the fact that someone has had a threesome is a state secret where ordinary people gossiping about it could be sent to prison,” said Hemming, who is no longer an MP. “This state secrecy undermines society, allowing the rich and powerful to conceal things that they find embarrassing simply by throwing money at the legal industry.”

PJS asked for a court injunction stopping the Sun on Sunday’s story because he said it would harm the couple’s young children. What made the dispute unusual was that media outlets in the U.S., Canada and Scotland published details about the case because they weren’t bound by the English court. That meant anyone searching online could identify PJS, and left the Sun on Sunday fighting for a scoop that was already available elsewhere.

Unresolved Issues

“The wider question of privacy protection in an online world remains unresolved,” said Amber Melville-Brown, a reputation lawyer at Withers.