Bart Lazar Quoted in eCommerce Times
“Judge’s Gagging of Wikileaks Ignites Free Speech Furor”

Bart Lazar was quoted in the article, “Judge’s Gagging of Wikileaks Ignites Free Speech Furor,” published by eCommerce Times on February 19, 2008. The article looks at questions about free speech issues stemming from a California court’s order to disallow traffic to a whistle-blower site that had posted internal documents from a Swiss bank.

Bart noted that while some weblog postings about the Wikileaks case have been quick to claim that government-backed Web censorship is taking place, the possibility that trade secrets may be involved, or that laws may have been broken by leaking the documents, do complicate matters significantly. "There is a difference between stating your opinion and illegally posting trade secret information," Bart stated. "If the information is truly a trade secret, namely it is the subject of reasonable efforts to protect and has value by reason of it being a trade secret, and the trade secret was, in fact, misappropriated, the likelihood is that the case and injunction should be upheld." He noted that the protection is necessary to avoid the financial chaos that would ensue if trade secrets, such as the formula for making Coca-Cola, for example, were widely posted on the Internet.