Slashdot Mirror
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it cannot identify the sources of the challenged information by means other than compelling petitioners to disclose unpublished information.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."
IANAL, but my lay guess: If you publish it as a journalist, you might be protected under the shield law from revealing that you are you are your own source... but you wouldn't be protected from having smuggled or stolen the document originally. Presumably, it wouldn't be hard to connect you as your own source. I'm also not sure, but I believe being an accessory may abrogate the privilege, and this ruling I believe is narrowly tailored with respect to civil (as opposed to criminal) cases; ask a real lawyer.
So, short answer: even if you're protected as a journalist, you can still be prosecutable as a crook.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
In adversarial games worth playing, public deterministic strategies lose.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
In adversarial games worth playing
Adversarial games are not worth playing. If you need to be adversarial, you're doing something seriously wrong with your life.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Amazing how those sentences are so physically close together, and yet one has to make an enormous leap to get from one to the other.
So this seems to be the method I aquired the information is the issue. I seem to have broken it down like this in simple terms if I am reading things right.
If I sneak into Apple and take pictures, documnet copies etc and post them online I am not protected.
But if I am told or given those documents, pictures, etc. by another person (third party) I am protected. Is this true or am I missing something????
"Adversarial games are not worth playing. If you need to be adversarial, you're doing something seriously wrong with your life."
Life is an adversarial game. It's a zero-sum competition, which means we are all adversaries. The fact that we form alliances in order to better compete with other alliances doesn't change the fact that we are still engaged in an adversarial game.
"Stumble before you crawl"
Perhaps you'd rather I used the older version of my remark: "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty". I was only trying to keep it light. Sorry.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Advocacy to the contrary, this ruling doesn't say much. The two sides are still arranging their pieces on the board, and the major facts of the case are still in play.
This is really just an example of the adversarial legal system in action. Both sides state their ideas in the strongest terms they possibly can, then the other side gets a chance to chip away as much it can.
In the previous round, the bloggers floated the idea that anyone who puts information on the internet is a journalist, and that anyone who posts protected information should receive the same legal protection as a whistleblower. The court didn't buy that, nor should anyone have expected it to. But that's where the defense started, because it would have been the simplest, strongest win they could get. All they really lost was the right to claim blanket immunity from prosectution for anyone, anywhere, under pretty much any circumstances.
Now it's Apple's turn. Apple floated the idea that it should get a free pass for discovery since the information in question was vastly important, and that the bloggers had no possible interest in publishing it. The court didn't buy that, either. Had the bloggers posted the product's schematics, or a discussion of some new, patentable idea that Apple had been working on, the decision probably would have gone the other way.
So as things stand now, the bloggers can't make the case go away on the grounds of blanket immunity, and Apple can't ask the court to fast-track its subpoenas because of the massive-and-ongoing damage it received. Neither of those was really a viable claim in the first place, but that's how the game is played.
The courts still have to rule on whether Apple has done sufficient work trying to find the leak by other means, and the bloggers still have to face questions about whether they knew the information they posted was confidential, and put it online anyway.
And NONE of this has anything to do with the question of "whether bloggers are journalists."