"Say, AtAT," you ask telepathically like Danny in The Shining and possibly without even knowing it, "how come you haven't said much about the ongoing lawsuit that Apple filed against Think Secret for spilling the beans about unannounced products, or the way it's subpoenaed source info from that site and others in order to sue the people who leaked trade secrets in the first place?" Well, kiddies, partly it's because we don't want to skew the Vegas odds on the outcome, but mostly we're just pretty ambivalent about the whole thing. We see valid points on both sides of the conflict, and since we generally prefer not to think about things if we can possibly avoid it, rather than mull over the issues during hours of TV-killing soul-searching and then coming down squarely in one camp or the other, we figure we'll just leave the matter unresolved in our heads and wait to hear what the nice judge will say.

You don't understand why we're conflicted? Well, okay, here's the problem: we think that free speech is absolutely the single most important right granted by the U.S. Constitution-- far more important than all that stuff about unreasonable search and seizure or not waking up to find three Army Reserve guys crashed out on your living room floor. Given that we yammer on endlessly here every day (well, okay, that's a stretch recently, but allow us a little poetic license) about the most esoteric trivialities, we really like knowing that the fundamental basis of our entire legal system guarantees that no one's going to pass a law making it legal to shoot logorrheic Apple-obsessed nutjobs just to get them finally to shut their virtual traps once and for all. So we'll gladly give up the right to bare arms and wear long sleeves even in the summer, just as long as no one in authority can tell us we can't keep spewing this drivel until we fall over in a heap.

But as every schoolkid knows, freedom of speech has its limits, which is why it's not legal to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater unless something's actually burning. (So if you want to do that, make sure you set fire to the place first.) Sensibly enough, the right to free speech starts to fade right when you get into the area of saying things that might deprive others of their rights. And that's why we can't see these cases in black and white terms; according to CNET, last week Apple argued that "there was no journalism" involved in what Think Secret and the other subpoenaed sites had done, which amounted to nothing more than "simply fencing stolen information by publishing it verbatim." And we can definitely see that point; if stealing a trade secret and passing it along to one competitor is illegal, why should soliciting insider info, knowingly receiving a stolen trade secret, and then publishing it so all of Apple's competitors can see it be protected as freedom of the press? This isn't the case of a whistleblower leaking secrets to stop some hidden corporate crime, or anything like that; these were product specs, posted solely for the sake of posting them. Given that trade secrets are "intellectual property," why is what Think Secret did any different than trafficking in stolen goods?

That said, Think Secret makes a solid point when it says that "if a publication such as the New York Times had published such information... Apple never would have considered a lawsuit." Think Secret is clearly the underdog, here, and there's more than a faint whiff of Calvin Klein's "Corporate Bully" lingering in the air.

See? We could go back and forth on this all night, and it's already cut deeply into our available TiVo time, so we're just going to leave things right where we found them and disengage before we sprain a frontal lobe or something. We can at least rest secure in the knowledge that, however it all turns out, we'll be able to nod our heads sagely and say, "there is merit in this outcome." Pretty zen, huh? Or maybe we should Yoda it up a notch and say, "merit in this outcome there is." Either way, we're going to need some cool cloaks.