Private property

Celebrities have a right to profit from the exploitation of personal information – and so do you

Something has been bugging me about the Leveson inquiry, and it’s not a private investigator hired by News International. It’s the pervasive line of defence that you hear when it comes to the invasion of privacy, and with the Sunday Sun rising in the east, it’s worth addressing.

There’s no chance the new Sunday red-top will revive the black arts of its predecessor and indulge in what the Met’s Sue Akers has called the Sun’s ‘culture of illegal payments’. But there is every chance that it will carry one basic assumption over intact. The assumption that celebrities who give interviews, pose for photographs, or in any way make capital of their private lives aren’t entitled to complain when commercial interests make capital of their private lives against their will.

Spoken and unspoken — the most extreme form of the position was given by the magnificent News of the World hack Paul ‘Privacy is for Paedos’ McMullan — is the following basic argument.