Max Mosley, as well as being a potentially high-tempo dress code for a dinner party, is a man who’s been on a mission to reset the parameters by which brands and individuals are able to comment on – or quash – media stories.

You’ll recall the story no doubt. Editorial with words like nazi and sex in the headline tends to have that effect. The former FIA motor racing president was the subject of a News of the Screws sting (copy now tucked safely behind the firewall) in 2008 that alleged the rumoured occurance all sorts of potentially pleasurable domestic shenanigans.

This week Mr Mosley, who was given airtime by The Guardian to state his case, took the matter to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Central to his privacy campaign is his belief that the media should be forced to notify individuals and organisations about stories that feature them before they are published, as not doing so is, he claims, a breach of human rights.

Now most PRs might think that something which compels journalists to call and run through a story’s contents before it even hits the subs desk would be fantastic. We’d get the inside track, be able to integrate other marketing tactics to further the impact of the editorial, and gain a greater sense of command (if not control) over the whole editorial process.

Or would we? If such circumstances became required, surely the media would only enable us to comment begrudingly, late in the process, in a formulaic way, with little room for brands to apply clever thinking to what they say and how they’re looking to influence their audiences.

To reinforce that point, think about how the British media works when it comes to seeking comments on editorial that it plans to publish. If journalists are actively seeking your expert input on their editorial in order to embellish it, validate it or add greater colour, then they tend to give you as much scope and time as possible to do so.  It’s in their best interests.  If a competitor, for example, has made claims about you, they tend to give you a ‘reasonable’ amount of time to comment and typically are hoping there are some tit-for-tat claims made by both parties in the run-up to deadline.

But if it’s a dirt story, particularly one that they think you’re likely to want to try to block or undermine in some way, they tend to give you as little time as possible, to narrow your window of opportunity to an arrowslit. Any comment will require you to think on your feet (or on one foot) and make what, the journalist hopes, is a token gesture, even defensive, comment. Legally, and by most written and unwritten press codes of ethics, you need to be given the opportunity to comment, but therein lies the issue. As a hack, my newsdesk would normally encourage me to give most people about 15 minutes to have their say, by which time the presses were already getting fired up to roll. Or 10 minutes if the guy was a real arsehole.

Should a judge be the person to decide on how editorial practice should be undertaken, rather than an editor? Well yes and no, in my view. The whole notion of ‘opportunity to comment’ does need some form of legislation so that it is better defined. But in the age of diverse and fragmented, one-way and two-way, conventional and social, media, the window of opportunity afforded is unlikely to be extensive.

But if we allow individuals and brands to stick the boot into any negative editorial concerning them that they do not like the look of, recruiting armies of bloated lawyers to mass in a pincer formation in order to nullify any threats, we’ll end up with a flacid, handcuffed media unable to deliver the potency of editorial that the world of PR lusts over and can ultimately thrive on.

And yes I am aware that that previous paragraph contains some sexual and nazi undertones.