Meanwhile, the latest development in the Apple-vs.-leakers First Amendment brouhaha has us, quite frankly, baffled-- and considering taking an ESL course, because it's possible that our reading skills aren't anywhere near as adequate as we thought they were. The hot-button topic at hand, as you all know, is protection of anonymous sources; critics of Apple's attempts to learn the identities of the couple dozen leakers it's sued (by subpoenaing the sites' email) claim that this is a cut-and-dried free speech issue, and that if the courts rule in Apple's favor and allow Apple to force online journalists to reveal their sources, then journalists of all shapes and sizes everywhere on the planet will see their confidential anonymous sources dry up overnight, at which point the fourth estate will crash and burn, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.

Wooooo! Important stuff, right? In fact, it's such an important case that apparently a slew of big-name newspapers has now signed on in solidarity with the Mac sites under fire. Faithful viewer Mac (he swears that's really his name) dished up a BBC News article reporting that "eight US newspapers"-- including heavy hitters like the LA Times, the Mercury News, and the San Francisco Chronicle-- have joined with the Associated Press agency to draft a brief in support of the sites being asked to give up evidence about the identity of the people who leaked them Apple's trade secrets.

This brief says, in part, that "recent corporate scandals involving WorldCom, Enron and the tobacco industry all undoubtedly involved the reporting of information that the companies involved would have preferred to remain unknown to the public," and therefore Mac rumors sites should be able to avoid ratting out the NDA-breaking employees who passed them trade secrets about the Mac mini. Because, as we all know, gross corporate accounting impropriety, knowingly poisoning the world's population, and wanting to keep details about an unannounced product under wraps for competitive reasons are all the exact same thing. Indeed, we're seriously starting to doubt our basic reading comprehension skills, here, because we'd swear that the judge make it crystal clear that, since the trade secrets leaked from Apple didn't expose gross wrongdoing or something else in the "public interest," journalistic protection of the sources' identities doesn't apply and any comparisons to Enron et al are completely spurious.

Maybe the judge never did say that, though, because we can't imagine that eight of California's largest newspapers all somehow missed it. Similarly, various Mac sites continue to assert things like, for example, "in an earlier hearing, Judge Kleinberg declared, in this instance, that bloggers and, by extension, on-line journalists, did not have the same kind of legal protection as mainstream media journalists"-- when, in fact, we were pretty sure the judge explicitly stated that he was declaring no such thing: whether the proprietors of the sites in question are officially "journalists" or not is moot, since his whole point was that "laws governing the right to keep trade secrets confidential covered journalists, too."

So we're going back to "See Jane Run" primers for a while, just to make sure we aren't misunderstanding what the judges are saying as this case moves forward. We'd sure hate to misinterpret some far-reaching ruling about the limits of First Amendment rights as, say, a lunch order for a turkey club on rye and a bag of Fritos. Blimey, this Constitutional interpretation is trickier than we thought!