From: Francis Hwang Date: 2005-04-03T01:45:41+09:00 Subject: Re: Admiring Apple (was Re: Respect and Disappointment) On Apr 1, 2005, at 12:50 PM, David Heinemeier Hansson wrote: > Apple gained ground in court not because the bloggers couldn't be > considered journalists, but because the nature of their revelations > didn't reach the status of being for "the public good" (like whistle > blowers at tobacco companies for example). As such, the court found > there was no ground for protecting the identity of people who've > broken their NDA's. From a legal stand point, I actually somewhat > sympathize with that ruling. And yet California state law specifically states that the journalistic privilege of keeping sources secret is absolute, without limitation. So it shouldn't have mattered in this case whether the revelations involved were for the public good; it's in irrelevant test in this case. Furthermore, I think it's worth noting that Apple did not in fact subpoena the journalists in this case to name their sources. It subpoenaed one of their email providers. First of all, this is in violation of the federal Stored Communications Act, which prevents such service providers from giving up confidential data in response to a subpoena in a civil case. Secondly, I think we should all be suspect about a court case which allows a company to subpoena your emails not because you may have information vital to national security or to some other public good, but because somebody (not you) somewhere broke an NDA, and you were involved. http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Apple_v_Does/faq.php After all, what's at stake is not, say, somebody selling launch codes, but some Apple employees leaking product information only a few weeks before those products were launching anyway. Apple called this a "trade secret" leak, but unless you imagine yourself to be up against some insane competitor who can clone your iPod Shuffle in two weeks, it seems like a fairly spurious claim to me. Francis Hwang http://fhwang.net/