IP Democracy: Apple Pays Bloggers $700K for Legal Fees

Under the American system of jurisprudence, anybody can sue anybody for anything. Unlike more enlightened justice systems, the American legal system is premised on the idea that each party to a lawsuit pays its own way, regardless of whether the legal claims in question have any basis and, more painfully, regardless of whether the party being sued ultimately wins. (There are exceptions, of course. Certain statutes have “fee-shifting” provisions where the loser pays and courts sometimes order the loser to pay the winner’s legal bills.)

The upshot of our everybody-pays-his-own-way model is that companies with lots of cash to burn, or companies that spend their money foolishly, file lawsuits that they can’t hope to win solely in the hopes of crushing their perceived adversaries under huge legal bills. Typically this means that big companies sue little companies just to get them out of the way or to keep them from becoming bigger companies.

A more odious example of this practice, however, is Apple’s effort to snuff out publication of what it deemed secret information by suing individual bloggers. This wasn’t a case of a personal vendetta or an attempt to hobble a would-be competitor; Apple was suing to limit the speech of a group of industry bloggers. My guess is that Apple thought the tiny publications would cave quickly rather than incur massive legal expenses, with Apple gaining the added benefit of scaring away any other writers from digging too deeply into the company’s inner workings.

That’s why it’s good news that Apple lost its fight and even better news that the tech and media giant has been forced to cough up $700,000 to pay the legal bills of the bloggers. Of course $700,000 is pocket change to a company the size of Apple. And the bloggers had EFF fighting for them.

Still, Apple (and we hope the rest of the business world) will think twice before suing any blogger again. In its decision in this case, the court wrote:

We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ news. Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment, which is to identify the best, most important, and most valuable ideas not by any sociological or economic formula, rule of law, or process of government, but through the rough and tumble competition of the memetic marketplace.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on January 30, 2007 2:38 PM to IP Democracy