Harvard Student Finds Attorney To Defend Him Against Apple Suit

Nick Ciarelli, facing a lawsuit by Apple Computer over information he revealed on his Think Secret website, will be represented by Terry Gross of the San Francisco firm of Gross & Belsky. Ciarelli, who uses the online pseudonym of Nick de Plume, had considered abandoning his website if Apple agreed to drop the lawsuit, according to a story reported today on National Public Radio, but the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has worked with Gross in the past, put the Harvard student in touch with the attorney. While Apple contends that Ciarelli revealed trade secrets, Gross plans to respond that the First Amendment protects the budding journalist’s writing, since nothing that Ciarelli published was illegally obtained. Pamela Samuelson has published an interesting working paper on the conflict between protecting trade secrets and freedom of speech, in which she also reviews the literature by other scholars in the area including Andrew Beckerman-Rodau, RIchard Epstein, David Greene, Mark Lemley, and Eugene Volokh.