This is a pretty accurate description of how the American justice system works for everybody, corporations and non-corporations alike. How do you suppose anyone (corporation or natural person) is supposed to find out if, in fact, they have been wronged without suit and discovery?

Say that one day you find a pet dead in the front yard. You don’t know if this was some sort of sick prank or somebody defending themselves from an attack. In your world, you have to figure out which of those things is the case before you sue. In the real world, you sue to find that out.

The fact of the matter is that some confidential information leaked out of Apple and ended up in the hands of Think Secret. Legally, that’s all Apple (or anyone else) needs to get a law suit off the ground and, barring something obvious, into the discovery phase.

The reason this is necessary is because one person has no legal right (or mechanism), outside of the civil discovery process, to compel the disclosure of information.

In other words, if a renter moves out of their house and their landlord withholds their deposit for cleaning, the renter has absolutely no way to force the landlord to prove that the cleaning was done without first filing a lawsuit.

In fact, cases in which the legal wrong is provable ex ante almost never even have suits filed because it’d be a huge waste of everyone’s time and money.

You might, now, argue that the whole justice system is completely screwed up… although you’ll be hard-pressed to find a justice system anywhere that requires proof before a suit can even be brought — it’s just backwards from how things are done. The proof comes last, not first.

That’s our difference here. I don’t concede to corporations the right to sue people and then figure out whether their trade secrets were violated.

Then you’ve conceded the whole argument. That is what a trial is for, to determine whether or not the allegations were, in fact, true.

You can’t, on one hand, say that if TS did it, they should face consequences and simultaneously say that Apple shouldn’t be able to investigate to determine whether or not that’s the case.

Some people believe that this settlement happened because the Think Secret guy wanted to quit his site and Apple feared it would lose the case, which had already been a public embarrassment.

If you have facts to show that Think Secret knowingly ran information from someone who violated an NDA, it’s worthwhile to discuss those facts. I will agree with you that knowingly doing with trade secrets that is wrong, at least within the realm of tech where there’s not a compelling public interest in getting the scoop on a new product. (Getting trade secrets of Halliburton would be a different animal.) But the guesswork you’ve done thus far is not persuasive.

TS lost the battle to keep their sources secret and decided to shut down rather than give them up. It wasn’t a question of Apple burying TS in expensive paperwork just to run up their legal bills, there were consequences of defending against the allegations that the defendant was not willing to risk.

Sure, you could come up with a million different hypotheticals where TS could have come up with the information cleanly. The question is not whether they could have, but whether they did… and if you think, as popular as TS is, that he ran every email from a “brother of a guy who got an email from some apple employee, who says…” you’re out of your mind. Once there’s cred to be had for being an “insider”, people try to pretend.

Ciarelli himself, in the NYTimes, said “I talk to sources, follow up on leads and get details confirmed,”

That last part? The “getting details confirmed” is virtually an admission that he’s inducing employees to violate their NDAs.

Besides… if your hypo was actually the case every time, he could’ve easily shown that the information was gotten legally and the case would’ve been over before it began.

I love how you make it sound like Apple and Think Secret were on equal footing, as if a corporation with a $169 billion market cap wasn’t throwing its weight around when it got the small web publisher to settle and shut down after two years of litigation.

Think Secret hasn’t pulled more than 120,000 visitors a month the past year, and usually is less than 40,000 a month. Where do you get the idea that it was paying for his Harvard education?

If you take the law out of it and just take a common sense approach, do you REALLY think that TS didn’t know their sources were violating NDAs?

Yes. Corporations give up secrets accidentally all the time. The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing, they don’t get NDAs, and they put stuff online and in email that gets around. If an employee told a friend outside Apple about the new MacMini, and that pal sent an email to Think Secret, the info’s clean as far as the site’s concerned. That’s just one scenario among many about how a secret site could gather information legally.

The bottom line is that this suit dragged on for YEARS and TS’s attorney (of Gross & Belsky LLP) is no slouch. What that means is that the legal issues here are not cut-and-dried. This is exactly what trials are for.

This isn’t the end days for the First Amendment, it’s two businesses quibbling about how one business came to have some of another business’s confidential information.

If you take the law out of it and just take a common sense approach, do you REALLY think that TS didn’t know their sources were violating NDAs?

What this comes down to is a bunch of apple nerds who are pissed off that one of their favorite spots went away. It’s not a constitutional issue.

The only “threat” here is that people might not have free access to information to which they are not entitled.

TS isn’t some “little guy” that Apple bullied. If it’s bringing in enough money to pay its proprietor’s Harvard tuition, it’s making enough money to hire competent legal counsel to defend it, which would probably be enough to get rid of a frivolous law suit. Apparently it wasn’t frivolous at all, and TS decided to cut its losses. That’s business.