Jackass of the Week: Richard Koman

Richard Koman wrote this report for O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter on the California Court of Appeal ruling against Apple’s attempt to subpoena email records from the ISPs for PowerPage and AppleInsider. For analysis on the ruling’s “impact on the industry”, Koman turns to Rob Enderle, whom he quotes via email:

“Apple is really the only firm that doesn’t use nondisclosure agreements and, as a result, they stood alone in this. So, other then [sic] a few execs likely feeling superior because they guessed the outcome of this correctly (did anyone really think it was going to end differently?) this should have little impact on the Valley.”

This is so false it’s laughable. Apple is arguably the most NDA-happy company in the entire industry. Apple probably has its janitors signed to NDAs. And as MDJ pointed out, the appeals court specifically noted that in this case, Apple’s employees had signed NDAs regarding the Asteroid technology. (MDJ further notes that even leaving aside point about NDAs, Enderle is still wrong about Apple “[standing] alone in this” — amicus briefs supporting Apple were filed by IBM, Genentech, and the Information Technology Industry Council).

For just passing this easily-refuted obvious nonsense along as though it were true, Richard Koman is our jackass of the week.

★ Friday, 16 June 2006