Apple Loses This Round In Blogger Case

smart2000 writes "A decision has been handed down in O'Grady, et al. v. Superior Court of Santa Clara County, the case commonly referred to as 'Apple vs Bloggers', in previous Slashdot posts. While like any court case it is complex, the short of it is that O'Grady won this round." From the article: "Apple has failed to demonstrate that it cannot identify the sources of the challenged information by means other than compelling petitioners to disclose unpublished information. This fact weighs heavily against disclosure, and on this record is dispositive."

Comments

Very interesting

[wootest]

The whole ruling is interesting reading, but towards the end (page 62 and forward) we find these very interesting lines, which I suppose sum up best why Apple lost the case:

"The publication here bears little resemblance to that in Bunner, which disclosed a sort of meta-secret, the whole purpose of which was to protect the plaintiff's members' products from unauthorized distribution. Here, no proprietary technology was exposed or compromised. There is no suggestion that anything in petitioners' articles could help anyone to build a product competing with Asteroid. Indeed there is no indication that Asteroid embodied any new technology that could be compromised. Apple's own slide stack, as disclosed in sealed declarations which we have examined, included a table comparing Asteroid to existing, competing products; there is no suggestion that it embodies any particular technical innovation, except perhaps in the fact that it would integrate closely with Apple's own home recording software--a feature reflecting less a technical advance than a prerogative of one who markets both hardware and software.

The newsworthiness of petitioners' articles thus resided not in any technical disclosures about the product but in the fact that Apple was planning to release such a product, thereby moving into the market for home recording hardware.

[..]

Publishing a computer manufacturer's proprietary code may thus be compared to publishing a miller's secret recipe for a breakfast cereal. What occurred here was more like publicizing a secret plan to release a new cereal. Such a secret plan may possess the legal attributes of a trade secret; that is a question we are not here required to decide. But it is of a different order than a secret recipe for a product. And more to the point, the fact of its impending release carries a legitimate interest to the public that a recipe is unlikely to possess."