I had been led to believe the Apple vs Think Secret, et al case was about the release of information about the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini. Coming on the eve (or near enough) of MacWorld, I didn’t see the harm.
The New York Times > Technology > Apple Can Demand Names of Bloggers, Judge Says:
The ruling came in the three-month-old lawsuit brought by Apple against the unnamed individuals, presumably Apple employees, who reportedly leaked information about new music software, code-named Asteroid, which the company said constituted a trade secret. Under California law, divulging trade secrets is subject to civil and criminal penalties.
[ . . . ]
Judge Kleinberg acknowledged that the public had a huge appetite for news about Apple, but said that “unlike the whistle-blower who discloses a health, safety or welfare hazard affecting all, or the government employee who reveals mismanagement or worse by our public officials,” the Web sites are “doing nothing more than feeding the public’s insatiable desire for information.”
Well, yeah, welcome to the Internets, the world’s largest back fence . . .
I still have a hard time getting beyond my (apparently old school) ideas about reporting/journalism as a potentially adversarial relationship: it’s a good reporter’s job to find a source of good information (good, adj. what people want) and the target company’s responsibility to close up leaks, however it cares to.
I think back to the penultimate decade of the 20th Century, when I was a cold-calling reporter for a publication covering the world of public accounting and financial affairs. A large part of my job was to call up CFO’s of public companies, as gleaned from public records and find out why the change was made.
In general, companies would change their auditing firm to cut fees: a new firm would offer a lowball bid to unseat an incumbent, but sometimes there were other reasons. My job was to get the basic facts, but try to elicit a more detailed response, maybe even get them to divulge the fees they had paid. On one call, I was told by the CFO about his former auditors, “I put my foot in their ass and kicked them out the door!” The editor and the marketing staff were delighted: what a great hook for future sales efforts and speaking engagements.
This was information people wanted: the firms wanted it, to keep an eye on their competitors as did public companies who wanted to know if their auditors were vulnerable to some fee negotiation leverage. It fits none of Judge Kleinberg’s criteria: it doesn’t affect public safety or indicate any malfeasance on the part of management.
It remains to be seen who the leakers were and if it’s worth canning them over this: does their value to Apple outweigh their traitorous behavior? And why they would leak information about a product that may not even see the light of day? That is a lot more destructive than just cribbing from printed information that would have been public in a matter of days.
Ya know, if it was me, I would open an unofficial Office of Disinformation and plant all kinds of whack but plausible rumors (you can come up with a few of your own, I’m sure) and use that as a weapon, rather than legal harassment. I think Steve & Co’s biggest sin here may be taking themselves too seriously . . .