Duchess Meghan May Sue The Mail On Sunday For Publishing Her Letter To Thomas Markle

I honestly think there would be nothing worse than if a newspaper A- thought I was interesting enough to write about and B- started going through my garbage to publish all the crap they find. Duchess Meghan has been going through that ever since she won the dating lottery and began to hump on Prince Harry. She hasn’t exactly had the easiest commoner-to-royal transition since, uh, her dad, Thomas Markle, and his side of the family are trash. The Mail on Sunday helped take it to the next level the other week by publishing a letter Meghan wrote to her dad after the wedding, telling him to cut his bullshit. It seems like Meghan REALLY didn’t appreciate that, so now she’s threatening legal action against them.

The Guardian says Meghan’s legal team threatened action against the Mail on Sunday based on the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, which basically says a handwritten letter like Meghan’s is protected by the same kind of copyright a literary work has. Considering all the lines about how he was breaking her heart “into a million pieces” and was “so far down this rabbit hole” of media whoring, Meghan proved she can start writing second-rate young adult fiction if the princess thing doesn’t work out, so it’s good that her personal correspondence is treated like royal literature! Mind you, it wasn’t like the paper actually went through her trash to get this note. Thomas forked it over himself. Alas, the royal family hasn’t been able to bring prisoners back to the Motherland from the colonies since, well, a long time ago, so Meghan has to go after the paper.

The editors at the Mail probably don’t need to get fitted for a spot in the gallows quite yet. The royals have invoked the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act before. Prince Charles didn’t like when the same paper published contents of a journal he wrote for friends talking shit about the Chinese government during the handover of Hong Kong back to China. British lawyer Alex Newman explained why the ball’s initially in Meghan’s court:

“As soon as you create a copyright work, you will own the copyright until it expires automatically. This gives you the right to prevent anyone else copying, or issuing to the public, the whole or a substantial part of your copyrighted work.”

OK, so maybe the Mail SHOULD get ready to be sent to the Tower of London, right? Well, maybe not. Alex said there’s a bit of a “fair dealing” loophole when it comes to reporting current events, where you can take bits of something like a letter and publish without asking Meghan. It may all rest on how important the letter was in the grand scheme of things. I mean, if it’s that letter or just a photo of Meghan cradling her baby bump while she shakes hands, I’d say publishing the letter was VERY important in reporting something that wasn’t journalistic Ambien. The royal family’s lawyers are also pissed at the Mail for publishing photos of THE QUEEN carrying dead birds from a January pheasant hunt on her Sandringham estate. I just figured the paper had mistakenly captioned the birds as Prince Philip and Duchess Camilla, but I guess there’s an invasion of privacy situation there, too. Sigh, poor royal family staffers. Now it sounds like EVERYONE is firing off emails at sunrise!

Here’s pics from Meghan and Harry’s “working” babymoon in Morocco.

Pics: Wenn.com