If you read a story like this one on Mediaguardian explaining how the New York Times has prevented internet users in the UK from reading a specific article it has published online, what’s your natural inclination?
To find a way to read the article of course!
According to the Mediaguardian piece and another piece on the New York Times website, they even stopped physical distribution in the UK of that edition. Whether international travellers were relieved of their newspapers at the same time as their beverages when boarding the flight, is not reported.
So what does a curious Brit do when faced with the prospect that US readers are learning more about the case than we are? He gets straight on the net, that’s what.
Google News reveals the existance of the article, but clicking the link gets me:
This Article Is Unavailable
On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial.
Of course that’s not hard to stop. There are plenty of anonymizers scattered around the web, and within seconds, I’m through to the page.
Except that I need to log on to the New York Times website to gain access to the article. So I use my regular username and password – the one that’s registered to me as living in the UK. Seconds later, I have the full text.
No doubt as we speak, people are emailing the text of the article back and forth faster than a Citigroup intern’s party invite. It all reminds me when Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher was published around the world, but not in Britain.
There are good legal reasons why the article shouldn’t be published in the UK, and I fully understand that, but somehow we have to confront these difficulties. In any case, rather than concentrate on the substance of the article (I’m not keen to be locked up for contempt of court), the bigger question in my mind is why British sources are feeding key information to US publications? Particularly as it’s precisely that information that could possibly cause a mistrial in the UK.
I realise that a certain amount of off-the-record briefing goes on ahead of big cases so that when a verdict is announced TV companies and newspapers have fully researched reports ready to go, but we’re months, if not years away from a trial at the moment.