26th November 2020

26 NOVEMBER 2020

Lee & Thompson Partner and media law specialist Leo Dawkins was quoted in a Daily Telegraph article yesterday that explored how it is legally possible to make programmes, like The Crown, that are based on real life people and events.

The article detailed the defamation and privacy issues surrounding the development of scripted life-story screen content.

Leo commented that “under the law in the UK, individuals don’t own the rights to their life stories and there’s nothing to stop anyone making a film about you, provided you do so within the laws of defamation and privacy.”

He added that one of the issues with programmes like The Crown, or any other dramatization of real life events that includes fictional elements, is that “if 80 per cent of the show is true but they make 20 per cent up to make it more interesting, you’re more likely to think the 20 per cent is true. The job of the programme maker is to make sure that if they make stuff up, they’re comfortable with the risk.”

To read this Telegraph article in full, please click here.

Find out more about our dispute resolution and content clearance work and recent experience here.