DISQUS

Here's an even more interesting question. If the telecom and cable designations change, would that mean that the telecoms are now subject to the public access laws? See link for particulars.

http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/P/htmlP/publi...

Here's an interesting link to a history of Apple's OS's:

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/oshistory/


Apple's certainly starting to act like MS. I suppose the ipod success has gone to their heads.

I couldn't speak for others, but I've spent a heck of a lot of time over the years on various Mac OS and hardware/firmware bugs and I suspect that the lawyers don't know how their own development staff and debuggers operate. This is certainly an issue given the Intel swich, as Apple's dual boot machine hit the stores with the platform compatability patch available only as a beta version. I'd guess this story is a case of the higher ups scrambling to shift blame for sloppy release coordination over to the technical staff...

Aside from the obvious points mentioned (blogs are self published journals, and as such qualify as public domain), the only possible case Apple would have would be if the journalist bloggers were given access to privledged information only after agreeing to explicit conditions in return. This happens a lot in journalism... I'll give you story x y or z, which you'll benefit from, but only if you let me clear your copy before you run it. Obviously Apple can't "require" or "demand" a legal right to be told how some random person learned a FACT... they can only claim a contract was breached or a crime was committed. Or I suppose they could claim libel if they could demonstrate material harm AND intent... which they can't. Pretty open and shut.

I'd suggest that Apple did bloggers a favor by getting the medium recognized as a print medium in a court case. Of course the downside of blogs having a legal standing as public press mediums is that bloggers will have to print retractions and pay damages if they get nailed with a libel suit.