PRIVACY IN MODERN LIFE

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 20, 25 January 1938, Page 8

PRIVACY IN MODERN LIFE

Modern inventions have brought problems as well as benefits. The racing broadcast case mentioned in recent cable news gives, an illustration. The Victoria Park 'Racing Club (Sydney) sought an injunction perpetually restraining the Commonwealth Broadcasting Corporation, Ltd., from transmitting descriptions of races during the progress of the Victoria Park meetings. The Courts in Australia declined to grant the injunction, and the Privy Council dismissed a petition for leave to appeal. The case presents an old and minor problem in a new and more important guise. For long, owners of open-air entertainment arenas have had to contend. with the spectator who looked over the fence. They have found no means of frustrating him except by building higher fences and adding screens. On occasions when some great spectacle has made it worth while, their efforts have been defeated by the erection of platforms or stands higher than the fences and on private land. Of course, the owners of the sports ground might meet this by building higher still, but usually they have chosen to cut their small loss of gate fees. . Now invention has brought wireless broadcasting which, from a tower outside the grounds, can give a running description of races or games. Later, television may give an actual view of the sport as it is in progress. The sports promoters cannot meet this challenge with .higher fences, for in England not long ago there was a threat to use aeroplanes to fly over the ground. Privacy can no longer be secured by close fencing. Counsel in the broadcast 'case admitted that there was no absolute legal right to privacy^ That has not hitherto been a source of worry. The owner who wished to be private just put up a high fence or wall, with perhaps barbed wire or broken bottles on the top. Now he finds that the only effective chevaux de ffise is an injunction, but the Privy Council will not even consider whether one can be supplied. Perhaps the reluctance of the Privy Council to pronounce on the point proceeded from a perception of the complications that would follow. If absolute privacy were conceded, to look over the fence would be punishable, and law-abiding people would have to avert their heads when passing the Basin Reserve in a tramcar. - If, however, a limited right were given to look but not to publish what one saw, the law would be extending upon, a grand scale the farcical anomaly now enforced in New Zealand where everybody at the racecourse may read the totalisator odds but no one may print them.