Say you find yourself in the posession of a video tape of someone famous doing something they shouldn’t. Your first port of call would obviously be the NotW. They would offer you £X for the tape.

Now the ‘bastard’ would just sell the tape to the NotW, not break any law and the famous person would suffer the negative publicity. No-one has done anything illegal in this case, apart from possibly the famous person. You get £X

Now say you’re not a bastard then you might think it would be a NICE thing to do to go to said famous person, say I am in posession of said tape and NotW have offered me £X for it. If you give me £X you can have the tape and avoid negative blah…

Now why is this illegal, can someone explain? It seems to me that blackmail is actually the honourable thing to do, the decent thing to do.

Perhaps it would need a contract of some sort to be written up, as I can see that future extortion might be a problem, but the current situation really does strike me as ridiculous.

Z.