Hello! ruling overturned

A British court overturned a ruling ordering celebrity magazine Hello! to pay more than $3.6 million to a rival for printing unauthorized photos of the New York wedding of Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

On Wednesday, three Court of Appeal judges backed the magazine’s challenge to a lower court’s order that it pay more than $1.8 million in damages and another $1.8 million in legal costs to rival magazine OK!, which had an exclusive contract with Douglas and Zeta-Jones.

The judges upheld the high court’s 2003 ruling that Hello! had breached the couple’s commercial confidentiality by publishing secretly snapped photos of their November 2000 nuptials at New York’s Plaza Hotel.

Hello! still must pay token damages of $28,000 awarded to the couple in 2003.