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Apple Sues To Stop Leaks
citizen_bongo writes "MacCentral reports that Apple has filed suit against unnamed individual employees of Apple and of other companies who were trusted with Apple trade secrets. The suit names 25 "Does" and surely will increase if Apple "uncovers" any more people in the conspiracy. This comes after the leak by ATI on the new Apple product line and the leaks surfacing about the Cube weeks before the MacWorld Expo." The irony is that if Apple's legal hadn't gone after the sites with Cube images, everyone woulda ignored it or thought it a hoax.
Therefore I urge you not to do business with Apple until they check their lawyers at the door and recognize the proper purpose of a legal system.
The proper purpose of a legal system is not to enforce a non-disclosure CONTRACT?
It's time to punish Apple for these tactics. If they spent half as much time and effort trying to develop their products as they do trying to squash ordinary rumours, maybe MacOS X would have shipped by now. The rule of law exists to protect against egregious offenses that threaten life or property. There is no way you can possibly tell me that rumours and leaks threaten Apple's property.
The rule of law ALSO exists in order to enforce non-life threatening or property threating agreements or contracts between two adults who otherwise are engaged in a normal business relationship. It is up to those two parties, not us nor the court system, to gage the degree of damage done when one of two consenting adults entering a contract decide not to carry out his part of that contract.
To assume that the law should not extend to governing contracts is to assume that contracts are worthless constructs, and that our society should behave as "who can fuck you before you can fuck them."
At which point, if this is the society you are advocating, then an employee of Apple has no recourse when Apple decides to take away his last month's pay.
I'm sorry, but the non-disclosure CONTRACT is just that: a contract. Just because some people can't be bothered to honor a contractual agreement they've entered because they don't appreciate the agreement doesn't mean they should be forgiven when they violate the contract. And just because we think this particular contract may be silly doesn't mean we should not enforce it: otherwise, other contractual agreements (such as sales contracts and work-for-hire contracts) may also be effectively null and void.
Are you saying that people who violate non-disclosure agreements should not be sued?
Or are you saying that Apple does not have the right to do anything in secret?
CNBC today revealed on air that one of the John/Jane Does (most likely the primary John/Jane Doe) that Apple is chasing after in their suit is a message board poster named "Workerbee" who posted on the Yahoo APPL message board as well as AppleInsider's Future Hardware message boards, and who posted pictures (on a Geocities website which disappeared today) of Apple's multiprocessing mobo and an early version of Apple's new optical mouse long before either were announced. Louismg on Raging Bull's AAPL stock board compiled a list of links to Workerbee's posts earlier today which can be seen here. The accuracy of Workerbee's posts on a wide variety of Apple hardware projects (Mouse, keyboard, Cube, MPs, iMacs, etc.) leads to the obvious conclusion that he or she must be an Apple employee. In one of his or her last posts before disappearing, Workerbee confirms the ZDnet story that Apple has a cinema-screened Powerbook packing a G4 ready to roll soon, and might even have been the source for the scoop.
Apple has always had their own way of doing things. They amaze me because they have no product research like other companies do -- Jobs has admitted that they don't do focus groups, etc. (Wish I still had a link around to back that up. I had always suspected it, and I was delighted to read confirmation a while back.)
Apple makes the products THEY think are neat. It just so happens that that set overlaps with a set of products that are desireable by the public. It's this overlap that keeps them in business. Sometimes, a truly neat product will fail to intersect the set of salable products, and then you have the Newton.
Enough of their products are innovative hits that I can see why they would want to keep them secret. Suing a bunch of EMPLOYEES will have a chilling effect on other folks with loose lips. It would make me shut up for sure.
In the entire computer industry, there is only one company where outsiders actually care what the new models are going to look like.
.28 DPI any more. Functionally, for most people, computers have leveled off, and in that situation, style starts to sell. Apple knows they are in the catbird seat in that department, and are going to make damn sure they keep their advantage.
Did anyone care what the Compaq iPaq looked like? The new Dell Latitude? The new Sun? The new AS/400? Those companies would beg to have fan sites printing rumors and unauthorized pictures about their new products.
It's never happened before that there's any interest in this sort of thing. Compare this to the auto industry, where every mag has a future model section. Why? Cars are a lot more than Consumer Reports ratings, MPG and HP.
Face it, the market's getting saturated, and you can't just sell product by being a "100% clone" or 1166 Mhz or
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
It's quite ironic that so many people in this thread have attacked Apple for ethical issues in this situation, as we are overlooking one very important point: these people that work in Apple and leak secrets, do you think they just do it for the fun of it? Do you think they do it without compensation?
How ethical is it for some entry-level employee who happens to work in Cupertino to take photos or screenshots of new Apple products (something (s)he had no part in creating), and hand them over to rumor sites in return for whatever compensation? That is stealing for personal gain. It's that blantant. Even if the personal gain is merely being "the one" to leak it. And you do realize that many of these sites make money from these leaks, right? They also do so for personal gain. This isn't an "information wants to be free" issue. It's a "make me some quick cash without having to do any real work" issue.
Despite the fact that some people will always hate Apple because they make a one-button mouse, you have to realize that there are a lot of people that work at the company that really are incredibly passionate about the work they do, and are really looking to improve computers as a whole. When an individual going to ruin all that work for everyone, that's simply disrespectful. How do leaks affect Apple, you ask? Apple was able to get considerably more eyeballs looking at the iMac and stories written on it because it was unexpected. Apple has every right to do this. Sony does similar things. Humans like surprises. At the very least, it breaks up the static in an otherwise very dull and stagnant industry.
This is not the US government covering up the discovery of an alien species. This is not a free speech issue. This is theft and sale of private information. Should Apple just let this go unchecked? Just ignore the problem and allow random people to announce Apple's products before Apple does? And sometimes it doesn't stop there. Sometimes these sites discuss products that MAY ship, and the mainstream press picks up on this and critiques them. In these cases, Apple gets grilled for things it hasn't even done yet.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. We have a double-standard for privacy issues on the internet. Privacy of a person is paramount, but privacy of a group of people (an organization) is irrelevant. Some people really truely feel that any information that belongs to an organization should instantly and immediately be the property of anyone with a TCP/IP connection. That doesn't make any sense to me.
For once, can we step back and look at this from a non-slashdot-centric perspective? Can we look a little deeper, and realize that there are maybe more factors to take into consideration when running a successful multi-billion dollar company than we realize?
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas