Court protects bloggers, reverses ruling in Apple case

2006-05-27

By Robert Niles: A California appeals court has overturned a ruling that would have forced bloggers to turn over to Apple Computer the identity of sources that leaked information about upcoming Apple products.

The Mercury News provides initial coverage. The court rejected the lower court judge's ruling that California's trade secrets law trumped its shield law, and went further to refuse to draw a distinction between people publishing news via blogs and those who publish in newspapers or on TV.

"We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalism,'" Justice Conrad Rushing wrote for the court. "The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here. We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish 'legitimate' from 'illegitimate' news."

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Comments:

From Jon Garfunkel on May 31, 2006 at 7:36 AM

Note that much of the popular perception of this case conflated the "small time online publishers" in the case with "bloggers"-- for maximum populist effect. Also curious was Judge Rushing's extensive citing of Wikipedia articles in the footnotes. He sought the distinction between "blog" and "webzine"-- and, as I surprisingly discovered, the words he quoted from the entry on Webzine... were mine.

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