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it cannot identify the sources of the challenged information by means other than compelling petitioners to disclose unpublished information.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 - so I wonder....

[Dark Paladin]

Does this case work then to help establish that bloggers can be considered "press" - and just because a person doesn't work at a corporate or even print newspaper, they are still protected under typical laws and rules the protect journalists? (For whatever that means.)

Can someone translate?

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

For those of us who aren't parasitic lawyers? :-)

Re:Dead Wrong

[Ana10g]

Yea, sorry about that... seems I wasn't quite reading correctly. So, if I may submit a conjecture, doesn't this mean that if you can smuggle a proprietary corporate document out the door, and somehow publish it (using any means available), you are protected under the shield law?

Lay speculation

[abb3w]

IANAL either; I just argue with them about the law. =)

My educated lay guess: First, the ruling is based in part on the California Constitution Journalist Shield, so in CA they are protected as journalists. Other jurisdictions with shield laws/amendments would consider the ruling advisory, not binding, but would probably be influenced by its arguements. In areas without specific shield laws it would again be advisory, and with more limited use due to the more limited protection of the First Amendment alone; I suppose it might give a basis for arguing against prior restraint in publication for a blog. Of course, that would imply someone would come to try and get a court to order prior restraint on a blog, an idea which would probably make most judge judges call for the Advil.

A weak victory

[nsayer]

The victory actually looks rather weak to me. If Apple had been able to demonstrate that they had no other means by which they could have rooted out the source of the leak, then it would seem the court would not have been able to dismiss this so easily.

Am I missing something?

Re:dispositive?

[deathy_epl+ccs]

What we really need is to get the legislatures to write law in clear, boolean logic that anybody can follow and always come up with the same answer...

While legal loopholes most definitely get abused, having all laws be "absolute, black & white, this is the way it is" has a lot of potential to really break down in situations where a little bit of common sense can save the day.

That said, writing the laws more clearly is not a bad thing... just making it a strict logical construct such as Modus Ponens ("if A, then B. B, therefore A") will not work in a real society.

Besides, the shysters out there (which is not all lawyers, but enough of 'em) would find some way to abuse solid logical constructs too. Give a person enough time and motivation, and they'll find an exploit for any given situation.

Re:dispositive?

[Jerry Coffin]

And lawyers wonder why we engineers and mathematicians snigger behind their backs.

Oddly, many of the lawyers I know are engineers. I can see where almost anybody could end up a bit twisted from trying to snigger behind their own back... :-)

What we really need is to get the legislatures to write law in clear, boolean logic that anybody can follow and always come up with the same answer....

Experience with programming languages, design specification languages, etc., would tend to indicate that even when everybody wants the communication to be clear, it often isn't. Add in a (sometimes quite strong) motivation to misread, misunderstand, etc., and there's virtually no chance you can prevent all misunderstanding and such.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm certainly not trying to say law-writing isn't open to improvement. At the same time, my own experience has been that a lot of the law is written far more carefully than it's given credit for. There's also quite a bit of room for a bit of judgement in legal matters -- in fact, I'd say some of the worst laws around are those that attempt to be completely binary, and remove all human judgement.