Opinion ID: 1217420
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: nature of privacy interests

Text: Privacy denotes a personal or cultural value placed on seclusion or personal control over access to places or things, thoughts or acts. Privacy also can be used to label one or more legally recognized interests, and this court has so used the term in several cases since Hinish. But like the older word property, which it partially overlaps, privacy has been a difficult legal concept to delimit. [5] Lawyers and theorists debate the nature of the interests that privacy law means to protect, the criteria of wrongful invasions of those interests, and the matching of remedies to the identified interests. These questions confront us in the present case. Thirty years ago, Professors Harper and James placed tort actions for invasion of privacy in their chapter on Recovery for Emotional Disturbance, recognizing that psychic or emotional reactions simultaneously defined both the injured interest and the harm resulting from its infringement. Harper and James, The Law of Torts 677-91 (1956). They though that the astonishing enthusiasm for invasion of privacy as an independent cause of action reflected technological and social pressures creating many new sensitivities, but they noted that the new concept quickly became a catchall for a great number of cases in which mental suffering or emotional distress was the primary injury sustained and for which no other substantive theory for relief was available. Id. at 682-84. Others questioned whether the phrase helpfully consolidated or merely obscured different torts. The second Restatement of Torts, following the work of its original Reporter, Dean Prosser, [6] noted that invasion of the right of privacy mixed four distinct wrongs, related not by similarity of defendants' acts but only by the interest of the individual in leading, to some reasonable extent, a secluded and private life, free from the prying eyes, ears and publications of others. Restatement, Second, Torts § 652A, comment b (1977). The Restatement defined these distinct wrongs as intrusion upon seclusion (§ 652B), appropriation of name or likeness (§ 652C), publicity given to private life (§ 652D), and publicity placing person in false light (§ 652E). The exact formulations of the Restatements are not necessarily authoritative statements of the law of this state, see U.S. National Bank v. Fought, 291 Or. 201, 213 n. 12, 630 P.2d 337, and id. at 226-27, 630 P.2d 337 (1981) (Linde, J. concurring); Brewer v. Erwin, 287 Or. 435, 455 n. 12, 600 P.2d 398 (1979), but accepting the classification for convenience, plaintiff makes no claim that the broadcaster's cameraman intruded on a scene of seclusion or that the pictures broadcast by defendant placed plaintiff in a false light. As stated above, plaintiff claims that the broadcasts gave offensive publicity to his private life and appropriated his image for defendant's gain. The common-law tort claim based solely on publicizing private facts that are true but not newsworthy has met critical response. See, e.g., Zimmerman, Requiem for a Heavyweight: A Farewell to Warren and Brandeis's Privacy Tort, 68 Cornell L.Rev. 291 (1983), reviewing part of the extensive literature; Ellis, Damages and the Privacy Tort: Sketching a Legal Profile, 64 Iowa L.Rev. 1111 (1979); Kalven, Privacy in Tort Law  Were Warren and Brandeis Wrong?, 31 Law & Contemp. Probs. 326 (1966). Such a tort was not part of the common law of England adopted by Oregon in 1843, and after study it was rejected in England, the home of the common law, in favor of alternative theories. [7] Criticism has not implied a lack of sympathy with the feelings of persons whose past or present lives are brought to public attention against their own wishes; but the obstacles to defining when publicity as such is tortious, without more, are formidable. What is private so as to make its publication offensive likely differs among communities, between generations, and among ethnic, religious, or other social groups, as well as among individuals. [8] Likewise, one reader's or viewer's news is another's tedium or trivia. The editorial judgment of what is newsworthy is not so readily submitted to the ad hoc review of a jury as the Court of Appeals believed. It is not properly a community standard. Even when some editors themselves vie to tailor news to satisfy popular tastes, [9] others may believe that the community should see or hear facts or ideas that the majority finds uninteresting or offensive. If the tort is defined to protect a plaintiff's interest in nondisclosure only against widespread publicity, as in the Restatement's § 652D, it singles out the print, film, and broadcast media for legal restraints that will not be applied to gossipmongers in neighborhood taverns or card parties, to letter writers or telephone tattlers. See Zimmerman, supra, at 300-03, 332-41. Finally, a successful tort action may serve to rectify a defamatory, appropriative, or false light publication, but in the pure private facts tort even success sacrifices rather than protects the plaintiff's interest in the privacy of the wrongfully publicized facts, for litigation only breeds renewed and often wider publicity, this time unquestionably privileged. [10] Writing in 1979, Professor Dorsey D. Ellis, Jr., found that there had been no reported case in which a plaintiff successfully recovered damages for truthful disclosure by the press since the United States Supreme Court reversed a New York judgment in Time, Inc. v. Hill, 385 U.S. 374, 87 S.Ct. 534, 17 L.Ed.2d 456 (1967), and he concluded that the tort's very existence is in doubt, at least outside the law reviews. Ellis, Damages and the Privacy Tort: Sketching a Legal Profile, 64 Iowa L.Rev. 1111, 1133 (1979).