What kind of world is this? Where judges in the highest courts say we must live in ignorance. Ignorance of truths. Truths fundamental to our very being. Like which celebrity's spouse had a threesome that may or may not have involved a paddle pool full of olive oil.
Over in Merry Ol' England there are laws recognising and protecting people's right to privacy. We don't have laws like that in Australia. But over there you can get injunctions preventing the publication of private matters, naming of names and the like. You can sometimes even get an injunction that is so secret that you can't even publish the fact that an injunction has been issued. Those ones are called super-injunctions.
The thing is that none of these privacy injunctions is actually very super. They're the opposite of super. We like to call them...unsuper-injunctions. The internet is largely to blame. A privacy injunction only has effect in the jurisdiction in which it is issued. So in practical terms, all this threesome injunction is doing is stopping the English press from publishing the same details as people can find outside the country or on the internet.
Rupert Murdoch's 'Sun on Sunday' said that the injunction was meaningless and that the law was an ass because it couldn't actually protect the plaintiffs in the age of internet publication. The UK Supreme Court accepted that the injunction did not offer complete protection, but would not accept that publication outside its jurisdiction was reason enough to remove the injunction.
That has to be the right approach, at least for now. The alternative is to throw up our hands, say it's all too hard and resign ourselves to digital anarchy. As to a long term solution? We're not sure. Maybe the internet needs its own, global jurisdiction. Chief Justice Grumpy Cat will preside.
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