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Think Secret's Nick dePlume Revealed
Nick dePlume has a name, after all. Apple filed a lawsuit against the pseudonymous founder and editor of Think Secret, who correctly predicted two just-announced Apple products and has been the subject of several cease-and-desist letters from Apple in the past; dePlume's identity has now been revealed. Reader willibeast writes "The Harvard Crimson reports that 'Apple Computer, Inc. is suing a Harvard undergraduate who runs a popular Mac information website for disclosing details about unreleased Apple products, including two unveiled at this week's Macworld conference. Nineteen-year-old Nicholas M. Ciarelli '08, known on the internet as Nick dePlume, has run the site, thinksecret.com, since age 13.'"
Aw, come on now. I was under the impression that Nick's identity has been widely known and documented over the years as Nick Ciarelli. After all, even in 2003, eweek had stories co-authored by Nick Ciarelli and Matthew Rothenburg.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
The threat of a big lawsuit can make one forget how much one cares about the anonymity of submitters.
That's probably what they are trying to do. Only they basically need this guy to tell them who is supplying him with information and/or his server logs. Seeing as how he says he will offer complete anonymity, i don't think he will tell apple willingly. Thus, their only real chance is to sue him to get a court order ordering him to turn over the names of the people violating the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement)
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Getting sued for correct predictions is stupid. Even if he had insider information, proving it will be very difficult.
I hope they have some serious proof that he had access to confidential information under a non-disclosure agreement or something along these lines.
From the article : "The suit, filed on Tuesday in the Superior Court of Santa Clara County, California, aims to identify who is leaking the information and to get an injunction preventing further release of trade secrets. However, in filing the suit, Apple identifies specific articles that contain trade secrets, indicating that at least parts of those reports are on the mark."
At least they're not suing him for damage, but to obtain the source of the leak. I'm no lawyer : can a court order someone to reveal its sources?
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
""California is one of approximately 44 or 45 states that have adopted [the] Uniform Trade Secrets Act. That statute makes it wrongful to acquire or publish without authorization information you know or have a reasonable basis to know is a trade secret of another," Milgrim said."
Ummm.. No, it doesn't. Mike was sued because he had mikerowesoft.com. Wich, when pronounced out loud, sounds *exactly* like microsoft.com. He wasn't sued because he was posting Microsoft pre-release material/rumors/whatever on his web page.
These are totally different cases.
bork bork bork!
The article says Apple is suing 19-year-old Nick Ciarelli. But surely they are actually suing The DePlume Organization, LLC, the limited-liability corporation that claims copyright to everything on the site? It seems unlikely that Ciarelli himself will suffer financial liability for this.
Breakfast served all day!
As much as I think it is not particularly good, why the *hell* would they care about hiring him?
If it was the frequently heard story of some person doing a technological hack to do amazing things with a product I would agree. An engineer that shows remarkable talent and resourcefulness with a company product is valuable to that company.
All this guy has done is leak whatever he could get a hand on to the internet. He didn't dress it up or drive marketing for Apple above and beyond what is normal, simply fed already eager apple fans information. So if you were thinking he was a marketing genius, it doesn't apply. As his hit ratio approaches 100%, in fact, he makes the 'big announcements' anticlimatic. There is nothing to demonstrate his alternative strategy/schedule for announcements is superior to Apple's plan.
I doubt the claims of tortious interference are valid, and the responsibility of the leaks lies with some eager employee(s) using the kid to preserve anonymity, I seriously doubt this 19-year old was proactively coercing anything out of Apple.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Sure Apple could sue an employee or former employee for divulging this type of information, but I don't see what duty the kid has to keep it a secret. Once he, as a member of the public, learned the secret, it was no longer a secret.
Go read the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Basically, if you knew it was a trade secret and knew that it was obtained improperly, and you disclose it, they can sue you for doing so.
However, it's possible that he could weasel out because knowledge of the existence of a product might not fall into the category of "trade secret" according to the definition of "trade secret" in that law.
It's also possible he could get out of naming names using the California Shield Law. This protects journalists from revealing their source (most of the time) and is written directly into the California Constitution, so it supercedes a lot of other laws there.
In short, if he hires a good lawyer, he can probably get out of it, and maybe even get his attorney's fees paid using the anti-SLAPP legislation. Depends on the court, really. His best bet is probably to turn the whole thing into a First Amendment issue in the eyes of the press. He'll be quite likely to get some support on that angle, you can be sure.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
He isn't the one violating any laws.
Actually, divulging trade secrets that were obtained illegally is itself illegal in many places. It's called "industrial espionage."
Actually, no. "A whole bunch" is a major overstatement.
Just saying ...
Matthew Rothenberg
Executive editor
Ziff Davis Internet
MacWEEK alum 1989-2000
I think that is the depth of this problem: Is the guy guilty of anything by collecting information given by others? To me it's very different from obtaining the information yourself. THAT would be espionage. But in this case, the guy just reports and the ones that should be sued are the contributors. Otherwise, Apple could as well sue slashdot for publishing information on a site reporting that Apple is going to release something new. And endlessly...sue the one that reported that Slashdot reported that... Unless you americans really lost the right for free speech and publishing and it's really THAT obvious that USA is now governed by big companies, this sounds more like Apple trying to make noise. They are targeting the wrong guy anyway.
Apple is saying that he "induced" the leaker to give him the information. This is illegal under California law. How the whole thing will work out in court will probably depend on the exact wording of all the legalese, and precedents.
Apple's case might not be nice, but it does have merit.
I.E. Did he obtain them via NDA, or did someone else give them to him. If they gave them to him, he's off the hook as it's no longer a Trade Secret and the ones who gave it out are in trouble.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
If the plaintiff wins a suit, or even has a reasonable basis to believe they may win (as determined by a court in possible countersuit -- and US legal tradition is pretty friendly towards the original plainiff here), then the defendant will not be awarded costs or fees related to that suit.
California breaks this down by cause of action: if the plaintiff pursues a single frivolous cause of action, even if every other part of their lawsuit is sound, the defendant might be able to recover costs related to defending from the frivolous cause of action.
As a non-lawyer, I would think Nick's best course of action is to move for a change of venue or dismissal due to lack of personal jurisdiction. Apple could probably not show that he had a presence in California.
As a side benefit, the two states where he is undoubtedly present (New York and Massachussetts) apparently have not passed the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. NY uses common law for trade secrets, and MA has some other statutory protections, so he may not be home free, but Apple would have a different burden of proof.
Email within a private company is not a matter of public record. One big exception is financial firms goverened by the Securities & Exchange Commission. They are required to archive business-related electronic communication for three years. This is a relatively new rule created in the wake of some high-profile accounting scandals a few years back.
By your interpretation, anyone who has ever deleted an email or failed to archive instant messages has some jail time in their future.
Bullshit. Ever heard of anyone being convicted of listening to the drunken ramblings of an industrial spy trying to decompress?
Ahh, yes, semantics. I guess it's only to be expected that a conversation about law would fall to it. We can go that route, if you like. In legalese it is considered a "breach", correct. But simply put, "illegal" is used quite broadly in common parlance and, as I understand it, doesn't fit perfectly with any of the more specifically honed legal jargon.
Since you can't provide a legal cite
For someone so hung up on semantics, you can't seem to grasp first order logical and related concepts. Just because I didn't provide a cite, doesn't mean that I can't or couldn't. Frankly, your point didn't seem worth the effort, but now at the end of a long work day and with you insisting on your somewhat lacking point, I'll bite.
I'll offer you the opportunity to point to any authoritative lay source which refers to contract breach as "illegal."
So, you yourself accept that it's an issue of common usage. Therefore, I'd first point to common language definitions of the word "illegal": first, from webster's:
and then from:hyperdictionary:
So then one is forced admit that it hinges on just what "law" is. Wikipedia states:
Going further, with the understanding the the legal system in the United States is based upon the British Common Law system, we look to the area of law that is Civil Law, specifically, the contract law, which owes its existence to concept known as the Law of Obligations :
Going further, the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University has much to say about contract law but specifically:
Therefore, it seems clear that inasmuch as a contract is a promise enforceable by law, and that contracts are regulated by a specific area of law, and that failing to fulfill the duties required by a legal contract have penalties enforceable by law, breaking a contract is going against the law, inasmuch as it's going against the specific, accepted rules of contracts, as understood through contract law. This is similar to other things that are held to be contrary to law (be it civil or criminal law such as murder) inasmuch as the law has systematic methods for the prescription of remedies for
The first amendment is what's called "statutory law", which means law written by legislators. Other laws passed by Congress are also statutory law.
When you ask "where specifically does it say in the 1st amendment", you're asking where is the statutory law that says so-and-so, with the implication that if it's not in a statute, it's not law. That's how it works in, say, Germany or France, which are what's called "civil law countries", which means "the law" and "the statutes" are the same thing. But that's not how law works in the US.
The US (and the UK, Canada, etc.) are what's called a "common-law country", just like the UK and various others. That means there's two kinds of law: statute law, written by legislators, and case law, written by judges. BOTH ARE LAW. And legislation is written taking this into account. In civil-law countries, legislators have to anticipate all kinds of details and contingincies into the statutes. So the German civil code has a lot more sections and subsections than the US statutes. Something is either in the statute or else it isn't. The law is fairly sharply defined, which sometimes leads to Procrustian results.
In the US, the law instead has a fractal boundary. The Constitution and the statutes are sort of a seed crystal. They state a generality and express an intention. Figuring out how to apply the generality and interpret the intention is left as a complex judgement call assigned to certain highly trained people called "judges" whose job, as the name implies, is to make judgement calls. Whenever a judge above a certain level makes a judgement call, that call becomes part of the law, binding on other judges, and in some cases (where the Constitution is involved), binding on the Congress. The law thereby grows a new tendril based that governs what happens with similar cases in the future.
This isn't some cockamamie idea invented by Bill Clinton---it's what was written into the Constitution by the Framers, based on 300+ years (now 500+ years) of English legal tradition that governed the American Colonies before the US became independent. If you're proposing that we throw out the Constitution and every other law on the books and start over with a civil law system, well fine, there's nothing wrong with having such a philosophy (might as well make us a monarchy while you're at it). But you don't get to pick and choose, living in the common-law system for things that you like and expressing outrage at it for things that you don't like. It's all or nothing.
So to answer your question, it doesn't matter whether the 1st amendment's wording specifically mentions journalists. There's ample case law (written by judges interpreting the 1st amendment) protecting journalists and that's what Nick is relying on.
IANAL, but IIRC he's only under any obligation not to publish Apple's trade secrets if he obtained them while under some form of agreement with Apple to keep them confidential, or if he obtained them from someone who he at the time was or should have been aware was under such a confidentiality obligation. Note that Apple telling him the information is confidential and secret doesn't constitute his agreeing to keep it confidential, so legally Apple's warnings have only limited effect (basically they oblige him to check carefully if he receives that information from someone he knows has connections to Apple after he received the warnings). Apple's going to have to show that the person who supplied the information to Nick was under a confidentiality agreement (should be trivial) and that Nick knew this at the time he received the information (not so trivial).
That's one of the gotchas to NDAs: people who didn't sign them aren't bound by them.