A state appellate court panel in California issued a decision on Jan. 29, 2010, allowing a lawsuit to proceed against the California Highway Patrol (CHP) and two of its officers for disseminating photos depicting a dead woman's body at the scene of an auto accident, on the grounds that the deceased's family members had a sufficient privacy interest in the photographs.
An Italian judge convicted three Google executives of violating Italy's privacy law on Feb. 24, 2010, after a 2006 user-generated Internet video of teenagers bullying a disabled boy was posted on a Google-maintained website. The three executives each received a six-month suspended sentence.
On March 1, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from Hustler magazine, allowing a right-of-publicity lawsuit filed against the magazine by the mother of a deceased professional wrestler to continue.
The California Supreme Court has permitted one claim in an invasion of privacy suit to proceed against a college professor who allegedly misrepresented herself to the plaintiff’s former foster mother in order to acquire information about the plaintiff. The Court denied the defendants’ motion to strike the suit entirely in February 2007, and remanded it to the lower court for further proceedings to determine whether the defendant’s alleged actions constitute highly offensive conduct that would give rise to tort liability for intrusion.
In the most recent segment of a 10-year legal battle, the full panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled May 1, 2007 that the First Amendment does not protect Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) from liability for disclosing an illegally recorded audiotape.
A dispute between neighbors led the Ohio Supreme Court to recognize the tort of false light invasion of privacy June 6, 2007. The 6 to 2 decision in Welling v. Weinfeld, 866 N.E.2d 1051 (Ohio 2007), called media concerns “overblown” and argued the pervasiveness of the Internet makes privacy protections increasingly important.
The Florida Supreme Court declined to recognize the tort of false light invasion of privacy on Oct. 23, 2008 in a unanimous opinion that held the tort’s chilling effect on protected speech outweighed its potential to create a new remedy for a narrow class of wrongs.
