The waters subside, the sun shines, spring may have sprung … and here we go again on the latest round of the great press regulation debate, where deluges of paperwork pour in from every direction. A largely Scandinavian team from the World Association of Newspapers (representing 18,000 papers and magazines around the globe) thinks the Cameron government's record on press freedom issues is threatening and a thoroughly bad example. A series of full-page ads – signed by Graham Norton, Paloma Faith and Richard Branson among more familiar Hacked Off regulars – wants the whole royal charter version and nothing but.

Meanwhile, the Press Complaints Commission throws a farewell party. It will be gone, replaced by Ipso, the new regulator supported by 90% of the press, before the last tulips die. Can the Guardian, Indy and FT – declining to back anything, including the charter, at the moment – be persuaded to join in? Well, the Guardian's editor, having collected a European Press Prize for his leadership in the great Snowden handicap chase, may have a Pulitzer to worry about first. But, in any case, Ipso is the only possible show in town before (or probably after) the next election.

Will it find favour, woo the doubters, avert the dangers that the WAN visitors see all too clearly? Much of that, frankly, must depend on the calibre of its new chairman and board (appointments still in progress). Some will hang on devising a sensible element of outside performance monitoring. A smidgen may require Hacked Off to turn down the decibels a bit. But the biggest challenge of the lot is getting the issues straight and seeing them true.

You may not, for instance, have realised from some of the reporting of WAN's findings that the Guardian's Snowden ordeal – arrests, threats, disk destruction – had any relevance to the charter argument. That portrayed, rather, a gallant Telegraph/Mail/etc fight for the freedom not to mention the Guardian at all. Fair enough; or, at least, free enough. But, as the paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, told his Scandi visitors: "If the press can't see the public interest difference between hacking and the NSA reporting, then the argument for self-regulation is rendered meaningless."

Press freedom isn't the right to publish only what you, personally, find pure and blameless. It's the right to make waves, big waves, and fight your corner – the right to be wrong as well as right. Freedom without a but, under the law … And there are clear limits to what any regulatory code piled on top of the law can sensibly do.

Take last week's attack by talented writer and Hacked Off stalwart Joan Smith on tabloid – Mirror, Star, Mail – coverage of L'Wren Scott's death, and its impact on Mick Jagger. The papers showed you the pictures. It was as though Leveson had never happened, said Joan.

Except that Sir Mick was grieving in Australia and Ms Scott was dead in her New York flat; and papers and websites around the world were full of these images (plus some grim speculation). It's the globalisation problem that Leveson flunked. It's the privacy issue that Britain, in its own small corner, can't run separately from America and all its websites. It's a grimy clone of the NSA ruckus, which Washington can't shut down while Cheltenham reaches for the curtains.

Press regulation, and any new code, whether Ipso or charter-run, won't stop the world and get off. Ipso with the wrong judge in charge could be a chilling mistake. The charter, with irate MPs waving order papers, could be baleful and menacing. And the WAN watchers are utterly right to be alarmed. The freedoms at stake here don't drop neatly into separate little boxes. They're awkwardly indivisible.