An army of drones marches into a theatre to the harangue of a giant, Big-Brotherish figure on a mammoth screen. Suddenly, a young woman sprints down the aisle and starts to hurl a sledgehammer toward the screen. Before she can release it though, she is surrounded and pummeled by a team of balding, briefcase-wielding men. "That's the Apple legal team in action, enforcing our intellectual property rights," chortles Big Brother Steve Jobs. "Welcome to Macworld, sweetheart."
During the Super Bowl broadcast 21 years ago Apple aired its famous commercial that concluded: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce the Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984." Judging by a series of lawsuits it's brought against websites reporting Mac rumors, Apple wouldn't mind seeing 2005 being much more like the George Orwell vision.
In Apple's most recent lawsuit it accuses ThinkSecret of a dire crime: publishing the truth. Recent stories ThinkSecret.com ran about this week's Macworld product announcements were apparently accurate enough that Apple says they must have been based on sources who were violating their confidentiality agreements with Apple. Apple seeks to learn who those sources are in order to keep them from stealing more of Apple's trade secrets.
"By this action, Apple does not seek to discourage communication protected by the free-speech guarantees of the United States and California constitutions," Apple argues in the lawsuit. "These constitutionally protected freedoms, however, do not extend to defendants' unlawful practice of misappropriating and disseminating trade secrets acquired through the deliberate violation of known duties of confidentiality."
Having been in computer journalism a long time and dealt with a few sources with "known duties of confidentiality," I have some knowledge in this area. So let me just say that if our constitutionally protected freedoms don't extend any further than Apple suggests, the whole idea of a free press is in a lot of trouble.
Any company, be it an Apple or an Enron, wants to control what the press says about it and when it says it. If a publication is going to do more than re-print a company's press releases, it needs to have sources of information who actually know something. It's not the publication's job to determine whether a source is violating confidentiality agreements -- the publication's job is to determine if what the sources are saying is true and if it's information its readers should know.
So there's more at stake here than finding out that a sub-$500 Mac is coming before Steve Jobs tells us. Under the rules of engagement that Apple's lawsuit suggests, whistleblowers who have been sources for stories about tobacco, auto, or energy industries could never have come forward. And as 2005 gets underway, I think many of us fear that we are much closer to 1984 than we were in 1984.
Read and post comments about this story here or write me directly at Foster@gripe2ed.com.
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