SKY 'UNABLE TO STOP BROADCAST'

Sky TV says it cannot stop the name of the American billionaire who
walked free on drugs charges from being broadcast in New Zealand.

The man's name could appear in news reports on the worldwide CNN
network, which is shown on Sky.

Sky chief operating officer John Fellet said the pay-television
company was given no advance information on what was included in the
CNN news bulletins, so it had no way of preventing the businessman's
name being broadcast.

"It's rather difficult because CNN doesn't send us a formal script ...
nor do we edit CNN. These laws were made back when it was a different
sort of media."

He planned to ask CNN if it could warn him of any items about the
drugs case.

The president of the Law Commission, Justice Baragwanath, said the
difficulties of stopping such broadcasts - and the fact that the name
was already on the Internet - were a wake-up call for the legal
community. He said they showed the physical limitations of the law.

"Electronic commerce is forcing the world's legal communities to face
up to the fact that we are no longer a little island protected by the
three-mile limit of the cannon shot which is the basis of what our law
was set up on a couple of centuries ago."

A suppression order was enforceable over all who were physically in
New Zealand but had no control over those outside, he said.

"The writ of the New Zealand court runs within New Zealand and not
beyond."

But John Miller, a law lecturer at Victoria University in Wellington,
said publishing the Internet address or name of a site that points to
it would be breaching the suppression order.

Suppression orders were sufficiently extensive in New Zealand to mean
the billionaire's name could not be reproduced in any form even though
the Internet was not operating when suppression laws were written.

A Wellington stockist of overseas newspapers and magazines, Magnetix
owner-manager Jill Roddick, said she had no plans to screen every
imported United States and British paper for the publication of the
man's name.

The billionaire, visiting for the America's Cup regatta, was
discharged without conviction in the Otahuhu District Court last week
after admitting three drug-importing charges. Judge David Harvey
granted him name suppression.