The Press Complaints Commission has rejected a privacy complaint from a woman about an article and pictures of her in Loaded magazine under the headline "Wanted! The epic boobs girl!"

She was said in the article to have the "best breasts on the block". The accompanying pictures of her were taken from the internet and readers were offered a reward of £500 for assistance in encouraging her to pose for the magazine.

The complainant said that the article intruded into her privacy. The somewhat provocative photographs had been uploaded to her page on Bebo in December 2006, but they had since been published on numerous other sites without her permission.

She said the magazine's article, published in February this year, had caused her upset and embarrassment, and that publication was in breach of the privacy clause in the editors' code of practice.

But the PCC decided that the pictures had been given such a wide circulation that it was no longer credible to describe them as private.

Had Loaded taken them from the Bebo site without them having appeared widely on other sites, the commission might well have reached a different decision.

The magazine, in contesting the complaint, explained that it was commenting on pictures that had been given extremely wide circulation on the net and pointed out that the complainant's photograph had featured in the top three of a Google image search on the word "boobs".

The commission did sympathise with the woman, and accepted that the tastefulness of the article was questionable. However, the issue for the PCC was whether the publication of the information was intrusive, and it decided that it was not.

The commission didn't think it possible to censure the magazine for commenting on material that had already had such wide circulation, and which had already been contextualised in the same way (ie, as an exemplar of beautiful breasts) by many others.

The ruling does raise issues about what constitutes the public domain in online terms, and how far editors are entitled to make use of it. In a sense, it's about whether people compromise their own privacy by placing material on the net.

Stephen Abell, the PCC's director, said: "The PCC has done a lot of work on the use of material taken from social networking sites.

This case is slightly different: it rests on material that has been given much broader dissemination online. The commission had to pay regard to the extent to which the information had already been made available, and also the context in which it had appeared. It judged that would not have been proportionate to criticise an editor for republishing this material, bearing in mind how - and how far - it had already spread. The commission has instituted an ongoing working group to consider issues thrown up by online publication, and will continue to think and act flexibly in relation to this challenging area.

I understand that online working group will also look at matters such as the prominence of online apologies, the archiving of complaints about articles and consider the possibility of developing a PCC online brand so that websites can advertise their adherence to the code.

The full adjudication can be found here.