Tonight I went to a screening of Rear Window, which stars Jimmy Stewart as a photographer with a broken leg and too much time on his hands. It uses the photographer’s eye to ask questions about the things we see when we look in on someone else’s private little world – where is the line between “public good” and “a nation of peeping toms?”

There is a very famous couple who launched some legal action last night, and though I’m not going to add fuel to the fire by naming names or linking to any photos, I will say that privacy laws in the UK are a very sticky wicket. We’ve already glossed over them in Publishing Law, and we’ll be devoting an entire class to the subject later in the semester. If I remember correctly, the right to privacy is granted in the US Constitution, but not England’s (or Ireland’s).