“Bloggers = Journalists?”

Apple Computers is mad. Someone took one of their R&D projects and spilled it all over a weblog, thereby putting the project in the public domain. Apple is suing the bloggers involved according to the Hoguester, to find out who leaked the details on the R&D. The bloggers are claiming to be journalists and therefore protected by the “Shield Law,” therefore needn’t release the names of their “sources.” The fact that the bloggers are conspiring with the sources to violate corporate confidentiality rules apparently never crossed their minds.

Quote, unquote “real” journalists (and I use that term RATHER loosely, that is, the term “real”) would understand that intellectual property just like real property couldn’t be taken from its owner without just compensation. I’m not a lawyer, but if I were Apple Computers, I’d be pissed!! These bloggers are not protecting the public from willful misuse of power or exposing criminal activity. They are willfully spilling the beans on a private enterprise, thereby potentially ruining a business opportunity for Apple Computers and putting Apple employees at risk for losing a market edge they no longer have thanks to these bloggers. Either that or they are fools being used by unethical people to cause injury to Apple.

I have no idea what the subject R&D project is, but that doesn’t matter. It is intellectual property that rightfully belongs to those that thunk it up, not to the blogosphere. Let’s step down from Apple size, to a one-man shop. Say I have thought up an invention that will set me and the fetching Mrs. Guano (not her real name) up for life. Some blogger that one of my guys foolishly talked to about the invention over beers starts up a weblog and spreads my work all over it. Do I have a right to be compensated for this take of intellectual property? I think I do. This weblogger can no more steal and broadcast my ideas any more then he can steal my personal property and sell it at a flea market.

So are bloggers automatically journalists? No. The practice of journalism does involve certain rules, procedures, and ethics like any other profession, notwithstanding current examples such as CNN, the Italian hostage/US Army target (yea right), Dan Blather, etc. Professionals will never willfully engage in any unethical nor illegal behavior – such as property theft. What we are seeing today in the MSM is a purge of those who have forgotten they are professionals in the field of journalism - not power brokers. Bloggers are redirecting the MSM back to the path it departed from long ago, but they need to follow a pattern of ethical behavior as well. Those that don’t need to be purged. Go get ‘em Apple, they earned your wrath.

UPDATE 1039: Linked the news item on this at the top. Apple is angry about unauthorized disclosure on a trade secret (aka intellectual property). I would be too, dang it! I gotta side with protection against property theft here over the blogger's supposed "First Amendment Rights." Yes, they can speak their minds and say what they want, but a line has to drawn at theft. My opinion, for what it's worth, this is property theft.