More Comment on Apple Secret Mania

It is nice to see San Jose Mercury News weigh in with an editorial on the dangers of Apple's pursuit of web sites  The editorial entitled, "Apple ruling puts all of us in danger," brings out some good points.

"The ruling is deeply troubling on many levels. First of all, companies have wide latitude to determine what is a trade secret. Anything they don't want published could potentially qualify. Second, the media have long been protected when releasing leaked trade secrets, such as internal tobacco company documents. The media's role in a free society is to publish information that is accurate and of interest to the public, not to protect the commercial interests of private companies."

Information Week goes on to talk about the trade secret issues, in their article, "Latest Online Scoops Thwart Apple's Bid For Secrecy."

The second line of defense questions whether news about Apple's products really reveals trade secrets. Trade secrets are generally defined as information that derives economic value from not being known and has been subject to reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy.

"Apple can't even prove trade-secret misappropriate occurred here," Gross says, "because there's no commercial advantage in this information just a few days before issuing a press release. No competitor is going to be able to take this information and use it to their advantage. And Apple makes no claim that any competitor did do that."

The real truth is that this is all about Apple marketing buzz.  Steve doesn't want anyone stealing his thunder.  These aren't trade secrets.  The buzz created by these web sites ends up making money for Apple not costing them money.  As Business Week said yesterday in "Memo to Apple: Lay Off Your Fans," Apple is wrong to attack these Apple fans.  Of course as others have said, those within the reality distortion field will defend Apple actions no matter what.  The rest of us just have to make certain that the glare of the iPod doesn't blind people to Apple's heavy-handed attempt to find their own leaking employees by attacking legitimate Internet news sources.

Comments

[Stephen]

Conspiracy Theorists Unite!

Mr. Jobs, noted Democrat and contributor to the Kerry campaign, now apparently follows the GOP & White House lead in supressing legitimate news, solid journalism, and investigative reporting!

Tight control of official information, only bathed in the warm glow of official press releases and PR handlers, carefully orchestrated events to showcase products in their best possible light?

I predict the next step for Apple PR/MARCOM will be to set-up front websites masquerading as rumor sites, but will be carefully fed information from Apple PR. This will be done in the same vein as the GOP news agencies who broadcast the party propoganda as "news", but in reality was simply PR policy advertising. Thankfully the NY Times outed this charade with a fine bit of investigative reporting:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html

Perhaps we'll even see a Steve Jobs/Apple PR blog as the Washington Post so aptly describes, "With Blogs Like This, Who Needs PR releases?".

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48437-2005Mar18.html