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Apple Ordered to Pay Blogger Legal Fees
inetsee writes "Apple has been ordered to pay legal fees for two web sites that reported on an in-development Apple project code named 'Asteroid'. According to the article on WebProNews, Apple was ordered by a Santa Clara County court to pay almost $700,000 in
legal reimbursement to AppleInsider and PowerPage after the court agreed with the Electronic Frontier Foundation legal team that the web sites 'qualified as legitimate online news sites' engaging in trade journalism. Apple had claimed that it had a right to protect its trade secrets, but
the EFF successfully argued that 'Subpoenaing journalist sources is not an acceptable means of discovery.'"
I lament the fact that acquiring justice, or clearing your name from a SLAPP, requires so much money. I think that there should be punitive damages in addition to legal fees when companies go after individuals in this way.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Does it seem like every day, Apple is seeming less like the good guy?
This isn't flamebait... (I love my Mac) its an observation that IMHO
over the past year Apple seems to have been far more agressive at implementing
"control" measures through legal means -- not as bad as MSFT, but a far cry f
rom the "We want everyone to love us" attitude of the past.
My question is: what changed? And is this the Apple of the future? Or
is this a result of some shift in management attitudes. (Or a case of
money and power corrupt, no matter who you are?)
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
I realize that this comment isn't going to win me any friends in Apple-land, but it's good for everyone (Except maybe Apple shareholders) if Apple's wrongdoings and attempts to intimidate news outlets into not carrying the news are exposed to a wider audience. A lot of people out there (including many slashbots) see Apple as the Brave Crusader out to kill the Microsoft dragon, but this view could not be farther from the truth. In reality, Apple is just another corporation, really not significantly better or worse than any other. They really are the lesser of two evils in the Mac vs. PC war.
A lot of people have cited Microsoft wrongdoing as part of their motivation to purchase a Macintosh. As this is basically an ignorant, knee-jerk reaction given Apple's own history, I theorize that these are the same people who don't believe a corporation has done anything wrong until it is proven in court. I hope that I am right, because this sort of thing has a chance to dent Apple's wallet, which is the only stimulus to which corporations really respond.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
this is why I support them. /me proudly wears my eff hat....
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Well that's one way to look at it, the other is Apple loses 700k. Maybe they'll think twice before trampling the rights of others next time.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
'Subpoenaing journalist sources is not an acceptable means of discovery.'
This sounds like it has some pretty big implications on freedom of the press, making it easier for journalists to keep their sources confidential (important if you want to keep your sources!)
=Smidge=
Does it seem like every day, Apple is seeming less like the good guy?
Um, who ever said they ever were a good guy in this matter? They never licensed their technology to outside companies, it took people kicking and screaming for them to even allow third party hardware before the 1990's. Try finding a non-Apple printer for a Mac before 1990 - doesn't exist. Apple has always protected their financials (see: iPhone and Verizon deal) and their IP/Technology. It's not a bad thing, it's just how they've always done business. You could argue that the reason the PC gained such a market share over Apple is because IBM didn't engage in litigation as much and allowed the third party market to flourish. Ironically, it's that loose control over the PC that's allowed it to gain the nasty reputation for the Wild West that is has now and that Apple capitalizes on with its newer commercials.
Isn't that what an iPhone is going for these days? Seriously, $640k should be enough for anybody.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Shareholders don't like lawsuits. If you repeat 700k enough times it starts to sting. What's worse, there could be other troubles for Apple if the government decides they're an unlawful business (e.g. rampantly violating the civil rights of others).
... oh wait ... how is that bad anyways?
That and now they get to continue reporting on every little detail of Apple
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
There are five ways that stealing/revealing a trade secret can be considered a federal crime under US Code Title 18 Part 1, instead of merely a civil matter.
Trade Secret law is not based on NDAs. It is a distinct section of US intellectual property law.
That just plain isn't true, and I don't know what made people start thinking that all of a sudden.
There are numerous ways to skin the related math. Comparing myself to Bill Gates, Gates wins hands down in terms of total amount donated, or percentage of holdings donated. On the other hand, I slaughter him with regard to scarcity of personal holdings remaining after all donations.
There's humor in my point above, but seriousness too. Bill Gates has not had to live without anything purchasable that he's wanted, whereas I've had to live without quite a lot of things that by varying degrees are "essential". Doesn't make me a better person than Gates, but conversely his pain-free, involved-as-he-wants-to-be actions don't make him a better person than me.
This line of thought applies when comparing Gates to other execs as well. How many of these execs have as much money as Gates to start with? How much did they have left when their donations were tallied up? How much in excess of some arbitrary standard of living/possessing did those amounts clock in at? All these questions are fundamentally aimed at discerning how much was really "given" in a way that cost the giver something, vs simply rearranged. If a corporate exec donates a billion dollars and keeps ten million for a lengthy retirement, how does that compare to a starving child who gives away a piece of bread and dies as a consequence? Who gets more "good guy" karma points?
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Please see the site exclusively devoted to Apple II clones. Virtually all of these (a couple hundred or so) were put out of business by Apple suing them.
Don't get me wrong: I think in most of these cases, Apple had a perfect right to sue. Many of these didn't even make an attempt at being legal or legitimate at all, just using outright copies of the Apple II ROMs and selling them. AFAIK, the only company that did legal Apple II clones was VTech, who did the (in retrospect) obvious thing: they went to Microsoft and took out a license to AppleSoft, just like Apple had in the first place. Other than that, most were just taking an Apple II, copying its ROM and putting it into a machine similar to a real Apple II. Apple successfully took nearly all of these (e.g. the Pineapple, most of the Franklins) off the market via lawsuits.
Apple also sued nearly everybody over supposedly copying their GUI -- in nearly every case, it was pretty obvious that the real source was Xerox, but Apple's motto seemed to be "it's our's; we stole it first." This forced changes (mostly minor) in GEM, and (IIRC) Tandy's GUI system (sorry, I don't remember its name).
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Note that if you consider these options unfeasible, 1 is caused by your own lack of ability, time or skill, 2, 3 and 4 are political problems which are in your own hands as much as they're in anyone's, and 5 and 6 are wired into us by evolution (or God/magical pixies if you're from the bible belt).
Otherwise perhaps you should consider that litigation is an extremely complex, difficult and time consuming activity requiring a very high level of expertise to conduct with any degree of competence. Large law firms do not make vastly more money than collectives of doctors, engineering consultancies, other groups of professionals, or large corporations.
In my view there is a tendency to regard lawyers as a rip-off simply because of the nature of the service, fighting it out to establish one's rights in circumstances which are frequently viewed as unfair or unnecessary, rather than the much more palatable "help me doctor, I'm sick/dying" or "help me, engineer, I need to build X".
The lawyers didn't create your dispute. You and the other litigant did.
Read Pynchon.
As an AAPL stockholder, I'd prefer to let Steve Jobs decide the timing of announcing new products, not some Web site trying to sell banner ads, claiming free speech.
Funny how the same /. crowd that though it was OK to have bloggers register with the US Government now become First Amendment absolutists when the law negatively impacts the intellectual property of the patent holder on AAC.
Now, go ahead and mod down that with which you disagree...
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
I've always said Jobs is dangerous. We gotta be happy that things now are as they are (Mac has a mere 2-3% market share, and as for consumer products like iPod - let it thrive, no much harm done, it's just a fancy nice mp3 player).
Bill Gates' original vision was to spread computers into every home, and make hardware a commodity platform, make the real product the software that makes this hardware useful.
Job's vision is more sinister though: this guy believes in perception, in hype, in marketing, and in easy to use and swallow products fed to the masses. A control freak.
Isn't it crazy how much work they've put on the iPhone (and deliver a nice, albeit expensive product), only in the end to cripple it by not allowing to tap its power with custom software? This is pure Jobs right there.
And you can be sure Apple's strange behavior towards rumor sites is coming straight from Jobs.
And there's a site that said the product was a Apple hoax deliberately created to catch where the leaks are coming from. Possible, but we have a real world example of what possibly really happened:
Did you know that months before Microsft announced the Tablet PC platform Apple was getting ready to release their own Tablet Mac? Well, just because they couldn't be first to the market and grab that "mindshare", Jobs scrapped the project. I bet he's now waiting for the Tablet PC idea to die and be forgotten, before he tries again.