An interesting ruling yesterday from the Press Complaints Commission on a privacy complaint from the Harry Potter author JK Rowling. Three newspapers - the Scottish edition of the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Record and the Daily Mirror - ran stories about her buying a house close to the estate she already owns in Perthshire.
Rowling, who has guarded her privacy with studied care ever since she sprang to fame, said that the articles revealed the location of her home and thereby invaded her privacy.
In 2005, the PCC upheld a previous complaint from Rowling after the Mirror published sufficient information to identify the address of her London home. She also won a ruling in 2001 because OK! magazine published pictures of her with her children on a beach.
This time around, however, the PCC took a much more pragmatic view. Had the newspapers been responsible for putting new material, namely her address, into the public domain? It decided they had not, though I noted that the commission - in its wisdom - decided not to mention the name of the Perthshire town in its adjudication.
Needless to say, this piqued my interest and in no more than a minute I found on the net the town's name and Rowling's full address. And this was not on a newspaper website at all, but on the Yahoo! answers service. Indeed, none of the papers had given the precise whereabouts of the Rowling home. So the PCC was surely correct, was it not?
