December 19, 2007: Apple settles a lawsuit with reporter Nick Ciarelli, resulting in the shuttering of Think Secret, his masssively popular Apple rumor site.

Writing under the screen name Nick de Plume, Harvard student Ciarelli had broken a number of Apple stories on the website, which he launched in the late 1990s.

The terms of Ciarelli’s settlement with Apple don’t get revealed. In a statement, he says he will “be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits.”

Apple drops the hammer on Think Secret

Anyone who has been following Apple news for upward of a decade may well have used Think Secret back in the early 2000s. Although Ciarelli never revealed the source of his scoops, someone deeply entrenched at Apple (at least at one time) fed him a steady stream of accurate (or mostly) accurate reports about upcoming products.

These included unofficial screenshots of OS X Leopard before the operating system was released. The straw that apparently broke the camel’s back, however, was a series of reports about an upcoming Macintosh and word processing software.

These were reported in 2004, and were later shown to be true when Steve Jobs debuted the Mac mini and iWork productivity suite at the January 2005 Macworld event in San Francisco.

Apple: The evil empire?

When Apple sued the website for revealing trade secrets, opinion among Apple followers was split over Think Secret.

Some saw the lawsuit as a violation of Apple’s generally friendly approach to cultivating fans. In short, now that Apple was once again climbing back to the top of the tech world, the company was using its resources to crack down on a small-time journalist. (Steve Wozniak was the biggest name who asked Apple to call off the attack dogs.)

On a larger level, some viewed the lawsuit as proof that Apple opposed freedom of the press. These people worried (perhaps with some accuracy) that clamping down on the rumor mill would result in a sanitized world of Apple news. In this view, the only inside knowledge would come, either directly or indirectly, through Apple-sanctioned channels.

Others sided with Apple, arguing that publishing trade secrets was not protected by First Amendment rights. For those of this mindset, it made sense for Apple to go after employees who shared proprietary information with outsiders.

Apple’s war on rumors

Stopping such leaks of confidential information appears to have been Apple’s biggest goal in its war against bloggers at the time. The company took similar legal action against Apple Insider and O’Grady’s Powerpage.

Jobs brought secrecy back to Cupertino when he returned to Apple in 1997. This triggered a big culture shock inside the company. During the early 1990s, Apple had been one of the more leak-heavy companies in Silicon Valley.

Think Secret publisher Ciarelli never shared details on the fallout from his legal battle with Apple, although he claimed to be an Apple fan before and after the suit finished. According to LinkedIn, he is currently running the company BookBub, which alerts readers to limited-time free and discounted ebooks matching their interests.

What was your introduction to the world of Apple rumors? Leave your comments below.