A French court Wednesday dismissed an appeal by the editors of gossip magazine Closer, who were fined 45,000 euros ($53,000) for publishing pictures of the Duchess of Cambridge sunbathing topless in 2012.
The court in Versailles near Paris upheld the maximum fines imposed by a lower court last year, which found Closer guilty of invading the privacy of Prince William's wife Kate.
It also confirmed that the celebrity magazine had to pay 100,000 euros in damages to the royal couple.
Closer published the grainy snaps of Kate wearing only bikini bottoms while on holiday with the prince at a chateau in the Luberon region of southeastern France in September 2012.
The pictures caused outrage among the British public and the royal family, which filed a criminal complaint and obtained a court injunction preventing further use of the images.
Even the British tabloids, usually voracious in their appetite for pictures of the royal family, declined to publish the images when they were first circulated.
In a letter read out in court in May last year, William said the case had brought back "particularly painful" memories of the paparazzi hounding his mother, the late princess Diana who was killed in a Paris car crash in 1997 while being pursued by photographers.
Lawyers for Closer editor Laurence Pieau and publisher Ernesto Mauri argued that the pictures of the royals were in the public interest and conveyed a "positive image" of them.
But the court of appeal rejected that argument and ordered both Pieau and Mauri to pay 45,000 euros in fines.