Or, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation puts it, "Huge Win for Online Journalists' Source Protection." The case in question, decided by a California state appeals court, concerned Apple Computer's attempt to force three online sites to reveal their sources for "insider" stories about Apple products.

The court ruled that the Web-only publications have the same right to protect confidential sources as other reporters covered by California state journalists' shield law. Journalism school students taking that required "media law" course should have fun with this one. (Here's a research topic for someone: "Does this court decision set a precedent in the use of Wikipedia for footnote citations?" See my note below.)

A San Jose Mercury News editorial commented:

"That, in a nutshell, is what a state Appeals Court decided unanimously Friday when it denied Apple Computer's request to force online publishers to reveal the sources who leaked inside information about an upcoming product. The broad, 69-page ruling goes a long way toward putting online and offline journalism on the same legal footing in California. The ruling also reverses a misguided lower court decision that would have had a chilling effect on all journalists. And in an aspect of the decision that received less publicity, it strengthens the privacy of e-mail."

Justice Conrad Rushing of the 6th District Court of Appeals dodged the cliche "bloggers in pajamas" issue and put it this way:

"We decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalism.' The shield law is intended to protect the gathering and dissemination of news, and that is what petitioners did here."

In its footnotes, the court decision does discuss popular definitions of "blogs" and "webzines," citing as its source... Wikipedia! In fact, the 69-page decision cites the free  anyone-can-edit-this encyclopedia in a half-dozen places -- whenever it needs to explain technical terms, video game references and even the purpose of the Apple product Garageband, which played a central role in the case, and which Apple has pretty thoroughly documented on its own site. (As far as I've noticed, Wikipedia only gets mentioned in the footnotes, and the notations do cite "as of..." dates for its references to the Web's ever-changing ultimate secondary source.)

The appeals court took the case after Apple won an earlier decision against the three news sites,  be they webzines, group blogs or whatever you want to call them,  http://AppleInsider.com, http://PowerPage.org and http://MacNN.com

Bottom line: The full court decision is here. (PDF courtesy of EFF.)


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