The Court of Appeal has criticised the "disgraceful conduct" of staff at Mirror Group Newspapers (MGN) who engaged in phone-hacking which led to the payment of record damages.
MGN had challenged Mr Justice Mann's ruling in May, which compensated eight individuals to the tune of £1.2 million, as being "out of all proportion" to the gravity of the harm done.
But Lady Justice Arden, Lady Justice Rafferty and Lord Justice Kitchin in the Court of Appeal have paid tribute to his judgment, which resulted from the invasions of privacy concerned being "so serious and so prolonged".
After their decision, owner Trinity Mirror indicated it would be increasing its provision to deal with civil claims from £28 million to £41 million and would pursue an appeal to the Supreme Court.
All the awards exceeded the previous highest sum given by a UK court in a privacy case - the £60,000 won by former Formula 1 boss Max Mosley who successfully sued the now defunct News of the World in 2008 - and are expected to provide a framework for resolving similar actions in the pipeline, which currently number up to 130.
Actress and businesswoman Sadie Frost received the largest sum of £260,250, with ex-England footballer Paul Gascoigne getting £188,250.
TV executive Alan Yentob was awarded £85,000, sums of £117,500 and £157,250 respectively were awarded to actresses Shobna Gulati and Lucy Taggart, and £155,000 went to soap star Shane Richie.
TV producer Robert Ashworth, who was married to actress Tracy Shaw, received £201,250, and flight attendant Lauren Alcorn, who had a relationship with footballer Rio Ferdinand, was awarded £72,500.
Dismissing the appeal, Lady Justice Arden said: "MGN cannot expect this court to come to its rescue and find some way of finding the awards to be excessive when its staff have been responsible for disgraceful conduct with such distressing consequences, and when to boot it is quite unable itself to point to actual awards that it contends are wrong.
"These appeals, hopefully, concern an exceptional situation. There were misuses of private information beyond our ability to know and count.
"So it is wrong to look at the global sums in the schedule which each respondent has been awarded without remembering that fact.
"In addition, the circulation of the private information was to a very large number of persons and touched on the most intimate part of the lives of some of the respondents. It understandably caused great distress."
She added that as far as she could see, there were no mitigating circumstances.
"The employees of MGN instead repeatedly engaged in disgraceful actions and ransacked the respondents' voicemail to produce in many cases demeaning articles about wholly innocent members of the public in order to create stories for MGN's newspapers.
"They appear to have been totally uncaring about the real distress and damage to relationships caused by their callous actions.
"There are numerous examples in the articles of the disclosure of private medical information, attendance at rehabilitation clinics, domestic violence, emotional calls to partners, details of plans for meeting friends and partners, finances and details of confidential employment negotiations, which the judge found could not have been made if the information had not been obtained by hacking or some other wrongful means.
"The disclosures were strikingly distressing to the respondents involved."
Press Association
