Who gets to play journalist? An academic question becomes a pressing legal issue.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Bloggers

APPLE IS ONE of the few companies large and intriguing enough to have attracted its own large subcategory of professional journalism. MacWorld competes with MacAddict and at least a half-dozen other glossies; Amazon.com lists 712 books under the category "Apple Mac," and true obsessives can cap off a day of Steve Jobs-related media consumption by listening to online radio shows like The Mac Night Owl.

As you might expect from an iconic, publicly traded consumer technology company with 11,000 employees and a cult following, there are quite a few Web sites dedicated to Apple as well: A Google search on "Mac blog" yields more than 20,000 results. Some of the more ambitious weblogs solicit anonymous tips from inside Apple's Cupertino, California, headquarters, and pounce gleefully on any scrap of information about future product releases.

One energetic site--O'Grady's PowerPage, run by Jason O'Grady at powerpage.org--obtained some specs of a new Apple gadget called Asteroid, which allows musicians to plug instruments directly into their computers, and posted a detailed company drawing of the device in November 2004. Apple responded by suing 25 unnamed John Does (and not O'Grady), claiming violation of California's Trade Secrets Act and asking O'Grady's e-mail provider, NFox, to reveal who leaked the data. O'Grady and two other sites that published information about Asteroid, Think Secret (thinksecret.com) and AppleInsider (appleinsider.com), received subpoenas demanding all Asteroid-related communication.

They responded by asking a San Jose Superior Court judge to block NFox from handing over the e-mails, on the grounds that they were protected from discovery by the California Shield Law, one of 31 statutes nationwide shielding reporters from being held in contempt of court for refusing to divulge information.

So the perennial panel discussion question--are bloggers journalists?--seemed to be getting its first high-profile legal test. At a time when an unprecedented number of American journalists are facing prison for protecting sources, this seemingly arcane question is suddenly no longer academic.

There are fewer than I million professional journalists in this country. There are an estimated 8 million bloggers--and potentially 280 million more. Extending a limited profession-based privilege, one otherwise confined to priests, lawyers, and therapists, to the entire population could make the whole nation impervious to court orders. But limiting...