 Irvine Wins Photo Court Case Wednesday March 13th, 2002
Northern Irishman Irvine, who drives for the Jaguar Formula One team, had sued commercial radio station talkSPORT for damages over the leaflet it distributed in 1999. "Mr Irvine has a property right in his goodwill which he can protect from unlicensed appropriation consisting of a false claim or suggestion of endorsement of a third party's goods or business," the judge told the court. The original photograph had shown Irvine dressed in his racing gear and holding a mobile phone to his ear, but on the cover of the leaflet the phone in the photograph had been replaced with a radio bearing a logo for Talk Radio, the name of the station at the time. The judge said he had concluded that many people reading the leaflet would have assumed Irvine's photograph was an endorsement of the station. He will decide the size of damages at a hearing later this month. At the time of the leaflet Irvine was at the height of his career with Ferrari and finished second in the Drivers' World Championships. TalkSPORT is owned by Wireless Group, the radio firm run by Kelvin MacKenzie, a former editor of The Sun newspaper.
Published at 12:10:04 GMT
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Formula One driver Eddie Irvine won a court battle on Wednesday for the use of a "doctored" photograph of him on an advertising leaflet for a radio station.
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