Posted by Eugene Volokh: Court Decision in the Apple Subpoena Case: The court has just [1]approved the subpoena against the service provider in the Apple v. Does case, which involves trade secrets that were leaked to and then posted on some blogs.
The judge did not deal with any possible subpoenas against the bloggers. He thus didn't decide whether bloggers are entitled to be treated the same as other journalists, but concluded that in any event the subpoena against the service provider -- which the service provider isn't contesting -- is constitutionally permissible. The judge did, however, signal that he isn't fond of third parties posting illegally leaked trade secret, analogizing them to "fences" of stolen information. I have argued that the First Amendment bars imposing trade secret liability on third parties, such as newspapers or Web sites, see [2]pp. 739-48 of this article, but it sounds like the judge disagrees. References 1. http://eff.org/Censorship/Apple_v_Does/20050311_apple_decision.pdf 2. http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/speechip.pdf _______________________________________________ Volokh mailing list [email protected] http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
