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Apple Agrees to Hold Off on Subpoenas
ido writes "Apple has agreed to hold off on serving subpoenas related to their John Doe civil suits against some free press journalists to reveal sources releasing Apple's "trade secrets." This is related to a previous article." The original story has some more background info as well. While Apple is notorious for its secrecy before MacWorlds, Apple probably figured out that dragging people into court usually does little for one's popularity.
While Apple is notorious for its secrecy before MacWorlds, Apple probably figured out that dragging people into court usually does little for one's popularity.
They probably caught the employee who was leaking.
Apple has successfully use subpoenas in the past. However, if they lost this case, they would have no ability to legally threaten people in the future.
Basically, they're withdrawing now to maintain the power to get stuff pulled from rumor sites when the ACLU and EFF aren't looking.
"Newitz said that "Apple may have a case" in suing anonymous individuals for violations of the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (the Act holds liable those who receive trade secrets that were knowingly misappropriated), "but the issue is how they're getting the information." She said that Apple's actions are following a "tortured route" and that the company seems to be attempting to "beat these journalists with litigation."
The EFF's position is that the Web sites in question are viable journalistic endeavors, which places their writers under reporter shield laws, both at the federal and state level.
The federal shield law, which is based on the First Amendment, guarantees the "free flow of information" and allows reporters to assure sources that they will remain anonymous.
"There is a loophole--it's not that a reporter never has to give up information," Newitz said. "They can be forced to reveal sources only if every other source is exhausted." Newitz said that she felt Apple has not come close to examining other potential methods of identifying the parties who leaked confidential information; she said that to her knowledge, Apple has never performed or admitted to performing an internal investigation into NDA (nondisclosure agreement) violations.
The facts of this case are a bit more nuanced than I have seen discussed so far. Does the First Amendment protect a reporter's right to withhold identify his or her anonymous sources? Yes. There are times when a reporter is asked to break this bond, and we are seeing a current case over the probable felony that resulted from revealing Valerie Plame's CIA affiliation where the issues are much more serious than this Apple business. In this more serious case, a crime was committed, and a couple of levels of courts have ordered the reporters to identify their sources or else face contempt charges. The New York Times, among others, continues to fight this pressure to reveal anonymous sources so as to protect the precendent for future anonymous sources.
This Apple case is not nearly as important, and no court is going to go around ordering reporters to reveal Apple news sources the way they are with those associated with the White House who may have committed a felony. And not only is the Apple case involving less serious information, it seems Apple hasn't even done the basics first: Conduct thorough in-house investigation into which employee is doing the leaking. Even the EFF says that once Apple has done everything else, forcing a news source to report the identity of an anonymous source might be on the table, from the legal perspective.
So for now, Apple is backing down. But this is not the clear-cut case that we've seen. It may yet come down to the Apple news sites being asked to reveal their sources, for it may well be that some Apple employees are violating the terms of their employment. And that's what Apple is really trying to do: Find employees who are violating contract rules. But first they have to do everything else to find out this information before they think of asking a reporter to give up his or her information. But that could yet happen.
If it really was treason, then wouldn't protecting those sources also be treason? Shouldn't the whole bunch just be sent to jail to rot (Or be executed if we were at war?)
Am I completely off base here?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You haven't cited your numbers for the dell.
Veritest PowerMac G5 comparison That's a PDF, I'm sorry to say.
This is the report your Apple scores came from. When Veritest ran the G5 against a P4 3 GHz Dell, the dell had an FP base of 693. You quote a 2.8 GHz dell at 1209.
Does this mean that a 2.8 GHz P4 is twice as fast as a 3 Ghz P4, or does it mean you made a big mistake somewhere? You *do* know that CPU benchmarking requires a careful equalization of all other parameters? For example, the G5 in this test had one processor physically removed and the Dell had its hyperthreading disabled.
Disclaimer: I don't own a mac, but I do use an iPod.
Mhz is the least important measure of a chip, since by increasing it you decrease the number of CPU cycles that're carrying data.
A Seti@home/Folding@Home dataset (IIRC it was folding) that usually takes about twelve hours on a pc will finish in about two on a G5, back when they were single-processor -- the on-campus computer store was playing around with their display model.
Still, until Half-Life 2 is available Mac native, few will buy them.
Distributing trade secrets to unauthorised parties in the US is an offence under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. So yes, it is illegal. As is knowingly receiving and acting upon information which contains trade secrets - which these rumour sites are, as another poster said, build upon. Apple did have a leg to stand on when it came to the Journalist - they had received information that could only be a trade secret at that time. There is no law protecting reporters sources, and a court can (and does) order a court to name or testify against their source. And 'stolen trade secrets' is espionage.
http://nsi.org/Library/Espionage/usta.htm
Actually OS X's UI is the best one I've ever used. The only extra things I have on it are quicksilver (sort of like the equivalent of the windows run command) and Synergy so I can control my music without even looking at iTunes.
Apple may have proprietary elements but they are just as flexible when it comes to open formats and interacting with other platforms (unlike Microsoft).
As for customer lock-in, yeah you're locked in more because of the hardware (though you can still install linux on it), but since my mac is a laptop and laptops of any brand are usually not very mod-able it's not an issue for me. If you decide to switch platforms again, many companies (like Adobe I hear) will gladly let you trade in your current installer disc for another of a different platform for a small fee.
Apple's hardware is actually quite good and really isn't all that expensive. Their lowest end GPUs are at the very least, mid-class and game worthy. You generally don't buy Apple's RAM (even their tech support people have been known to say buy from somewhere else), and you surely can't be bitching about Apple not having 4Ghz CPUs, anybody posting here should know enough about CPU architecture to know that the clock speed is only one of many factors that determine how well a CPU will perform.
So exactly how is Apple not only as bad as Microsoft but "worse"?
I don't see Apple refusing to let their OS read and write any other file system besides their own or not allowing other OSes to write to their file systems. I don't see them making efforts to make their version of an office suite incompatible with everything else. At least as a mac user you have Apple, the Open Source community, and the Mac community willing to work on solutions to make user experience better. With Microsoft you really don't see as much of an effort to make computers more enjoyable to use.
"Locked-in" I may be but I've never reached a level of frustration with my mac that I ended up hitting it (Can't say the same for my machine running windows).
The disadvantage of a trade secret as opposed to a patent is that trade secrets have no legal protection once they aren't secret anymore - that's why you have to have NDAs and contractual guarantees that your employees won't reveal them. If you embedd your trade secret IP in a product, and it's reverse engineered out, you have no protection. Trade secrets basically give you the power to keep things secret, as long as you actively do so. Once you stop keeping it secret, the information is no longer protected. The formula for Coke, for example is (famously) a trade secret rather than a patent. If published, it would no longer be protected and anyone could make something identical to Coke.