Apple’s a funny company. It’s loved by intensely devote fans for three reasons: attention to detail in developing easy and pretty interfaces, focus on graphic and creative arts, and It’s Not Micro$oft.
Thus, whenever it does something ham-handed to demonstrate that it is, in fact, just another company and just as likely to do something Big and Corporate as, say, Micro$oft, there’s always sort of a cognitive dissonance that takes over the computing community. It’s like finding out that dear Martha, who volunteers at the soup kitchen and serves on the altar guild and invited everyone over for such a nice dinner last year and buys lots of cookie from the local Girl Scouts, is also a slum lord and under investigation by the local newspaper and the state attorney general.
Apple’s biggest misstep of late is suing some blogs that are famous for offering “inside scoops” on Apple’s plans and the like, and obtaining a court order to force those blogs to reveal who the insiders are who are.
This pits the meme of “Apple is our Last, Best Hope against the Evil of Redmond” vs the meme of “Corporations are Evil.”
It also raises the issue of what blogs truly represent, and which, if any, and if not all, of the protections of a “Free Press,” they enjoy. If these particular blogs were printed magazines and papers, certain protections would automatically pertain. If they are purely electronic, and not-for-profit, does that somehow make their content any less protected?
I dunno. The purist in me says that should be the case — but let’s carry that thought forward. It was easy to say that something is the “press” if it’s a published information source when publishing was a relatively costly and very discrete act. Now that anyone can publish with a few mouse clicks, are we left with the idea that any dissemination of information is, in fact, the “press”? Is it ever possible, under that model, for a company to sue for its (obvious) interest in finding out who’s revealing confidential information? If I’m an industrial spy, and I pay off someone in Apple to spill the beans on some new computer they’re working on, what do I have to do to be protected against revealing my source? If blogging something makes me the “press,” then does simply shouting it on a street corner?
My absolutist love for the First Amendment wars here with the idea that we’re establishing a dangerous extension of a system that worked, with very little thought (or concern) as to what the ramifications are. Yet, if blogs are not protected in some fashion as the press, where do we divide the line? Is a blog by a newspaper the same as the newpaper itself, legally? What about a blog by someone who works for, or is published by, a newspaper? Or a blog by someone who considers himself a journalist? When does the expression of opinions become protected as being from the press?
Interesting times.
(via Kottke, BoingBoing)
Perhaps I missed it in reading your post too quickly, but you didn’t mention the mroe typical First Amendment issues: freedom of speech independent of freedom of the press. It seems to me that Blogs are very close to a fuzzy boundary between personal speech and press speech, but since both are covered by the First Amendment, it seems to me that there’s no question that blogs are protected by the first amendment.
Have the courts protected freedom of the press in some special way that I’m not thinking of at the moment? That might make the question of whether or not a blog should be treated as a part of the press important, but I’m still inclined to think that blogs should get the highest possible protection, and that the question of whether a blog is a part of the press or not isn’t going to be a useful question to ask.
The current cases have to do with protecting sources. I don’t believe there is a “free speech” protection against revealing sources, but the courts have tended to protect representatives of the press.
Ah, good point. I wasn’t thinking about protection of sources. It doesn’t seem obvious to me that it can be justified using the First Amendment. At least on the face of it, the First Amendment says the press can say whatever they want in print, it doesn’t say anything about not incriminating others when in court. There might be an indirect argument suggesting that if the press must reveal its sources, then that would prevent it from being able to report on some things, thus making a legal obligation to reveal sources into an infringement on the freedom of the press. But I don’t think that argument works. The indirect argument is about the freedom of the source to be anonymous rather than the freedom of the press to print what it learns. So does the First Amendment guarantee the right to speak anonymously? I don’t think so. The Fifth Amendment might, but I don’t think that works in this case, because the speech in question is presumably the illegal act since the inside sources are presumably violating a non-disclosure agreement of some kind when they speak to the press. I don’t think the courts would interpret either the Fifth or the First Amendment as allowing otherwise illegal acts.
Freedom of the press indicates some ability to act without government compulsion and oversight. The press would be unable to act effectively were sources unable to speak off the record.
That said, it’s not absolute, and it’s not explicitly stated as such in the 1st Amendment. Reporters have been able to stand silent on such info, but they’ve also been tossed in jail for it, too, if a judge considered it necessary for it to be revealed.