This is an interesting and potentially worrisome decision (more later; gotta go to work). This California judge ruled that the right to protect trade secrets trumped a journalist's right to protect the confidentiality of sources.
He didn't address a topic many wanted answered: Whether bloggers should be considered journalists.
An excerpt from the BBC story:
Apple's lawsuit accused anonymous people of stealing trade secrets about the Asteroid music product and leaking them to the PowerPage, Apple Insider and Think Secret websites.
All three are Apple fan sites that obsessively watch the iconic firm for information about future products.
Apple is notoriously secretive about upcoming products which gives any snippets of information about what it is working on all the more value.
The lawsuit to reveal the names of the leakers was filed against three individuals: Monish Bhatia, Jason O'Grady and someone else using the alias Kasper Jade - all of whom wrote for the Power Page and Apple Insider sites.
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 ...an interested public is not the same as the public interest  Judge James Kleinberg |
In the ruling handed down this week by Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge James Kleinberg, Apple can now get its hands on e-mail records from the bloggers' net providers.
In making his ruling, Judge Kleinberg said that laws covering the divulging of trade secrets outweighed considerations of public interest.
California has so-called "shield" laws which protect journalists from prosecution if what they are writing about can be shown to be in the public interest.
The Judge wrote: "...it is not surprising that hundreds of thousands of 'hits' on a website about Apple have and will happen. But an interested public is not the same as the public interest".
Judge Kleinberg said the question of whether the bloggers were journalists or not did not apply because laws governing the right to keep trade secrets confidential covered journalists, too.