Shulman v. Group W Productions, Inc.

Opinion

WERDEGAR, J.

More than 100 years ago, Louis Brandéis and Samuel Warren complained that the press, armed with the then recent invention of “instantaneous photographs” and under the influence of new “business methods,” was “overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency.” (Warren & Brandéis, The Right to Privacy (1890) 4 Harv. L.Rev. 193, 195-196 (hereafter Brandéis).) Even more ominously, they noted the “numerous mechanical devices” that “threaten to make good the prediction that ‘what is whispered in the closet shall be proclaimed from the house-tops.’ ”…