Steve Jobs Makes Us Work

Someone interrupted our drinking during the first night of D: All Things Digital and said something worth blogging about. The Apple confounder strayed from his well-tuned “we’re all very proud of our four percent market share” patter and edged toward politics. Sith-style politics. Here are our hastily scribbled notes mostly paraphrasing his response to Walter Mossberg’s and Kara Swisher’s on-stage interview questions about the “Apple blogger case.”

The law is very clear… You aren’t protected by the First Amendment if you are breaking the law… and these bloggers posted documents that were Apple trade secrets. They had ‘Confidential’ and ‘Apple’ stamped on them….There are times when the court has ruled that the public good is served, that you can break the law in the service of the public good but we don’t feel publishing our trade secrets rises to that.

Swisher: “Would you have sued if the Wall Street Journal had done this?”
Jobs: “We might have. But the Wall Street Journal has serious thought behind it… the thing is today is that everyone can be a journalist… we are in a gray area and we are trying to help in some small way.”

Also, when he’s talking about the “serious thought” at the WSJ is he including the Personal Journal’s toilet reviews? Because those are awesome.

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