The celebrity wedding took place in November 2000. The couple sold the exclusive photo rights to the event to OK! magazine for £1 million. But a paparazzo intruder disrupted their plans when he surreptitiously took some rather poor shots of the couple. These were then bought for publication in OK!'s rival magazine, Hello!
In April the couple won their case in the High Court claiming that Hello! had breached rights of commercial confidence by publishing the photos. An additional claim for invasion of privacy was rejected by the court.
The question of damages was left to a later date, but on 7th November the Court finally delivered its ruling. The judge awarded £1,033,156 to OK! in respect of the magazine's commercial losses, but made a small award to Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas.
This amounted to £3,750 each for their distress at the publication of the unauthorised photos, £7,000 for additional costs in having to help OK! bring forward the publication of the authorised pictures, and £50 each under the Data Protection Act.
The nominal sum under the Data Protection Act was explained in the April judgment. The Honourable Mr Justice Lindsay reasoned that, while the couple may have suffered damage or distress, such damage or distress was not by reason of a contravention of the Act.
Following the Act, Hello! should have sought permission to print the photographs; but Justice Lindsay asked, "If the obligations under the Act had been performed would it truly have made any difference?"
He speculated that permission would have been refused and that Hello! would have elected to go ahead and publish in any event.
"Thus," he wrote, "although I hold there to have been a breach of the requirements of the Data Processing Act [sic], I do not see it as adding a separate route to recovery for damage or distress beyond a nominal award, which I shall make."
His reasoning appears to be based on the fact that they were compensated for distress on other grounds, to the sum of £3,750 each.
According to Reuters, Hello! was "very happy" with the award made to Zeta-Jones and Douglas, commenting, "It reiterates clearly the decision of Mr Justice John Lindsay that Hello! at no time had any intention of damaging Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones." Inevitably Hello! was less happy with the seven-figure sum awarded to OK!