This just in: Apple Computer has decided to drop their case against online journalists who “leaked” sensitive company information. Specifically, they let the deadline pass without filing an appeal to the California Court of Appeal’s 6th Appellate District ruling.
A brief history of the case, courtesy of Internet News:
The whole mess began in December 2004, when Apple filed suit against 20 unnamed and presumably unknown individuals, referred to in the court filing as “Does,” for leaking confidential materials on an Apple product under development to several Web publications, including the Web sites AppleInsider and PowerPage.
As part of its investigation, Apple subpoenaed Nfox — PowerPage’s email service provider — for communications and unpublished materials obtained by PowerPage publisher Jason O’Grady. A Santa Clara trial court upheld the subpoena in March of 2005 and the EFF appealed.
In a 69-page ruling, the 6th District Court of Appeal ruled that bloggers and webmasters are no different in their protections than a reporter and editor for a newspaper. “We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ news,” the judges wrote.
“Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace,” they wrote.
According to various online articles, Apple was unavailable for comment at press time.
This is very good news for bloggers and other online journalists. In this era where both companies and our own government are trying to restrict the amount of information available, it’s good to have an appellate court affirm that the rights (and responsibilities) of a free press apply to bits and bytes traveling across the Ether(net) just as much as they do to those who used a manual printing press and moveable type back in the day that the Constitution was first written.