Not what you were expecting? Get this into the public domain
Careful what pictures you stick up on the internet. A young lady, with (well there is no other way to say this) with large breasts and a little more enthusiasm than logic perhaps, once put up some mildly provocative photos of herself on Bebo. (Yes, we are going to try and write seriously on this subject).
People being people the pictures rapidly circulated online. The woman in question was rapidly identified (she’s called Alix Bromley) and you can find her your self in about 3 seconds. There are when we last looked 1.76 million matches of her online (?!) and 203,000 image matches linked to ‘epic boobs girl’ [yes, type it yourself later].
When the Press Complaints Commission, of which more in a second, looked up ‘boobs’ on a Google image search, Ms Bromley came up third (yes, this is what regulators do) — although I think on further research something seems to have happened between now and then.
The up stepped Loaded, which published the pictures of Ms Bromley suggesting she had the ‘best breasts on the block’. Uh-huh. Readers were offered 500 quid if they would care to help getting her along to a photo shoot.
She complained to the PCC saying the pix were intrusive. The chaps at the PCC then spent days staring at computer screens researching the subjec. And reached their conclusions today. Which was that Ms Bromley had nothing to complain about.
Why? Because the pix were all over the internet. There were, in effect, in such widespread circulation that the PCC “judged that [it] would not have been proportionate to criticise an editor for republishing this material, bearing in mind how — and how far — it had already spread”.
In other words — if it’s everywhere online, you’ve lost your right to privacy and in the case of the picture taker, perhaps to copyright too. Which is why everybody was last week furiously spreading the David Cameron Shepard Fairey image produced by The Sun, and why perhaps with enough spreading that Bullingdon Photo will be impossible to suppress too.
Only if Loaded had nicked the pix direct from Ms Bromley’s Bebo page, would it then have fallen foul of the PCC’s code. Which may not feel like very much protection, but I think the principle is correct. You can’t have a world where everybody is talking about something online and not reproduce it in print.
So, when’s she doing the shoot again?