Steven Price

My book

Media Minefield


Guide to NZ Media Law

Official Information Act

Official Information Act


Bill of Rights Act

Media law resources

Feeds (RSS)

Archive for October, 2013

Can Len Brown sue for invasion of privacy?

Thursday, October 17th, 2013

It’s always a bit dangerous to speculate on the legal significance of facts when a story is still emerging and not all those facts have come out. And the tort of invasion of privacy is still itself emerging from the misty depths of New Zealand’s common law, so its outline is not entirely clear either. […]

Editorials undefended against defamation suits?

Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

Here’s a surprising thing about the Defamation Act 1992. It removes the right for editorials to argue honest opinion (what used to be called “fair comment”). You ought to be sceptical about that claim. It sounds absurd. Editorials are the very epitome of fair comment/honest opinion. They are written on the assumption that the defence […]

Defamation ruling not very appealing

Tuesday, October 8th, 2013

Reading the Court of Appeal’s decision in Smith v Dooley [2013] NZCA 428, you get the feeling that the High Court blundered in all the ways it’s possible to blunder in a defamation case. Lang J couldn’t even correctly work out what the words meant. And even if he’d got that right, he couldn’t tell […]

No one-stop media regulator

Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013

The good news, for the Law Commission: the government thinks the Commission’s report on media regulation –  recommending the establishment of a one-stop media complaints body serving print, broadcast and online platforms – is “excellent”. The bad news: the government has rejected that recommendation. I summarised the Commission’s proposal in an earlier post. In short, […]

Sign up!

Wednesday, October 2nd, 2013

Like many others, I’m worried that NZ is about to sign up to a Treaty (the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) that looks like it will have wide-ranging implications for our own laws – our ability to regulate genetically modified products, intellectual property, tobacco and alcohol, the flow of capital, the environment, the purchase of medicines, and […]

Nipples of discontent

Tuesday, October 1st, 2013

It seems the whole of NZ’s media are carrying stories of the “nipple ban”. The stories say the Commercial Approvals Bureau has denied the NZ Breast Cancer Foundation permission to run an ad about breast cancer because it features nudity. Reading through the storms of readers’ comments, I’m encouraged to find that most people think this is daffy. (Take a look at the Scottish […]