Opinion - Blogosphere gets a taste of corporate control culture. Recent legal judgments in the US give ammunition to corporate control freaks, and won't help the free flow of information on which we depend, argues David Tebbutt.

Many blog authors are equivalent to, or even better than, professional journalists. Indeed, some of them have been journalists and some of the web-published media are as good as professional publications. And they get into 'print' quicker.

Just as radio, and then television, expanded the existing media, so the internet and the 'blogosphere' are expanding the current media mix. Some news aggregators are starting to incorporate blog content - Factiva and Moreover are making advances in this direction.

You can imagine the heat and steam that was generated in March by a judge's 'tentative ruling' to treat bloggers differently to conventional journalists. US judge James Kleinberg refused to afford Shield Law and First Amendment protection to some bloggers and their online publications. Shield Law protects journalists from being in contempt of court if they withhold the identity of information sources.

Apple was the company trying to extract some names from the bloggers' email accounts. The bloggers, Apple devotees to a man, tried to stop this happening. Their sin had been to publish some confidential company information, and Apple wished to identify the employees who'd spilled the beans.

No doubt the bloggers had given assurances to the informants that they would never reveal their names, believing they were protected by the Shield Law. In their naivety, they also mistook 'what the public is interested in' for 'the public interest'. This quickly became a side issue.

The 'tentative ruling' appeared to hinge on whether the bloggers were really journalists. This caused a massive rumpus in the press and in the blogosphere last month. It comes to something when the mainstream media, which has no reason to like ...