Mail on Sunday ‘may print smaller front page statement admitting Meghan won legal battle’

Lord Justice Warby ruled that the Mail on Sunday must acknowledge breaching copyright rules in a front page notice earlier this month

(PA)

The Mail on Sunday may print a smaller front-page statement admitting that they lost a legal battle with Meghan Markle than the one she originally asked for, a judge has ruled.

The Duchess of Sussex requested that the notice, which acknowledges that publishing extracts of a private letter she wrote to her father breached her copyright, be in a similar size and font to the front-page headline about her letter.

But Lord Justice Warby, who ordered the paper to print the notice earlier this month, said in a High Court ruling that its length means that it’s “not really comparable” to the headline and its font may be smaller.

He also reportedly ruled that her request to have the statement in a “prominent position” was not suitably precise and that the MailOnline – who also carried the story – must display the statement on its homepage for a week, rather than the desired six months.

In today’s ruling, Lord Justice Warby again refused the paper’s publisher, Associated Newspapers Limited (ANL), the right to directly appeal his decision, but did grant a “stay” order, meaning that the notice won’t appear immediately.

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The stay will expire on 6 April to give ANL time to apply to the Court of Appeal.

When the statement is published, it will read: “The court has given judgment for the Duchess of Sussex on her claim for copyright infringement.

“The court found that Associated Newspapers infringed her copyright by publishing extracts of her handwritten letter to her father in The Mail On Sunday and in MailOnline.

“There will be a trial of the remedies to which the duchess is entitled, at which the court will decide whether the duchess is the exclusive owner of copyright in all parts of the letter, or whether any other person owns a share.”

Ms Markle was granted a summary judgement over her copyright claim by Lord Justice Warby last month after he judged that a letter she had written to her estranged father, Thomas Markle, was “private and personal”.

He said in his ruling that ANL’s claim to owning the letter “seem to me to occupy the shadowland between improbability and unreality”.

The publisher responded that it will apply to the Court of Appeal.