The Guardian newspaper in London, England, was ordered by a British Court to take material down from its Website, that was published, pertaining to documents which describe the lengths Barclays Bank went through to avoid paying taxes in Britain. According to Noam Cohen, of The New York Times, the judge in the case, Nicholas Blake, also ordered The Guardian not to tell its readers how easy it was to located the documents on Web sites outside of Britain. The reasoning for Judge Blake’s decision was that Barclays Bank had a "right to confidentiality."
The decision in this case, and in others that are sprouting up across England, highlights one of the major fundamental differences in how the American justice systems views privacy, and how the British, or Anglican, justice system views privacy. Neil Richards and Daniel Solove wrote a law review article on this very subject back in 2007, but only now, as the Internet becomes more influential in how information is passed, are we starting to see some of their observations in practice. Mr. Richards and Mr. Solove suggest that Justices Warren and Brandeis, who have been hailed as the inventors of the right to privacy, actually formulated their opinions on privacy from a "negligible body of precedents" prior to conceptualizing it in the famous 1890 Harvard Law Review Article.
British privacy common law tends to be centered around a "robust body of confidentiality law protecting private information from disclosure," and from that confidentiality is focused on "relationships" that involve "trusting others to refrain from revealing personal information to unauthorized individuals. Confidentiality protects the information we share based on the expectation of trust and reliance between the information "teller" and "receiver." Justice Warren and Brandeis pointed American privacy law in a new direction by a more general protection of privacy from invasions by strangers. For obvious reasons, both the American and British viewpoints of privacy have positives and negatives reflecting from it.
The editor of The Guardian stated that technology is so far ahead of the law, and that the law is limping along trying to keep pace with technology. The issue for newspapers, in England, who publish material online that is unauthorized is this: If a court orders the newspaper agency to take down the confidential material, hasn’t the information already become public domain? Surely, the media attention alone from the court’s injunction will cause other sites from other parts of the world to publish the unauthorized material. The readers in England, need not view it on The Guardian’s Web site, they could google it on The New York Times, and read it there. The editor and attorneys for The Guardian argue that once the information is placed on the Internet, the injunction no longer serves any purpose, and the court then becomes an interference in The Guardian’s ability to do business.
To read more about this article, please click here: In Britain, Web Leaves Court Playing Catch Up