Slashdot Mirror
Apple Ends Anti-Blogger Legal Effort
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has decided not to appeal the decision against it in it in its case against the product-information leaking bloggers. News.com discusses the ramifications of this decision, which may make future online journalists bolder in their actions." From the article: "Court documents show the company's investigators interviewed 29 employees who had access to a key confidential document — but Apple did not examine them under oath or examine their computers. That's one reason, the appeals court said, to grant the online journalists the protective order they requested. 'Apple has failed to establish that it adequately pursued other possible means to identify the source of the information in question,' the judges said."
The original headline is correct. Apple ceased it's appeal strategy in the case by their own volition. The previous Slashdot article that referenced the original court case decision would have had the headline Apple Loses Anti-Blogger Effort.
Apple already lost, and was down the same path when their lawyers realized there was no way to turn the appeal. All your post came off as is a whiny anti-Apple poster looking for ways to taunt the same fanboys you mention.
If I remember the text of the ruling correctly, the judge didn't completely refuse to visit the question. He said that he wasn't going to visit the question of whether they were journalists or not because he didn't have to. In this case they were acting as journalists, which was sufficient for the purposes of determining whether the shield law applied in this case regardless of whether or not they were journalists in a broader sense. This is actually a better ruling than merely saying bloggers are journalists. If taken as precedent it basically says that anyone is protected as a journalist when they're acting as a journalist, whether they're a full-time journalist or not.