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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

The content may have been a civil breach of contract for the originator to disseminate, but you commit no breach nor crime by looking at it, as you have no non-disclosure agreement with Apple.

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Quite a few of us probably DO have an active NDA with Apple (e.g. from being a Registered Apple Developer). Though IANAL ,from my reading of the terms viewing the materials shouldn't constitute a breach of the NDA either.

You're not Disclosing anything by downloading it, so I don't think the Non-Disclosure Agreement would apply.

Right. And unless the materials were specifically enumerated, even then, it'd be hard to argue that your NDA for software development would apply to "a service manual I obtained from someone who didn't have the right to distribute".

That might need to be qualified: depending on jurisdiction, just because if you don't have a contract with Apple, you shouldn't necessarily assume you're safe from civil liability (if you use or pass it on to others, at least). Here in England, in some circumstances it's possible to be held liable in Breach of Confidence for passing on information you come across that you know is confidential, even without any kind of pre-existing relationship like a NDA.

(N.B. I have no idea whether that's true anywhere else but England. Also IANAL, this isn't legal advice, etc.)

When it's posted on the front page of a news site, it's hardly confidential any more...

True. I was thinking of the submitter, though - it's not obvious to me that a court would consider a file uploaded to an anonymous file sharing site is part of the public domain (test: 'so generally accessible that it cannot be regarded as confidential') before it reached the front page of hn.

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