Apple fires employees for Leopard downloads

Hmmm the NDA issue is a tricky one. The NDA to my knowledge applied to attendee's of the WWDC so thus not to the employee's that were stupid enough to do this (no idea how they were found out). The point is that does the 'NDA' apply to commenting on Leopard based on the huge amount of info available online not least that which is shown on the Apple WebSite. They must of done something more i.e say 'WOW isn't leopard great I have it running on my machine right now'.
Apple have released pretty much 90% of the features on the preview copy to the press so just 'discussing' these features would to my mind not be enough for dismissal. It had to be far far more than that.

Still pretty dumb though.

I think Apple did the right thing to fire these employees. They ilegally downloaded software from Apple, the company they work for. This is so stupid. They just harm the company (and themselves). A company like Apple which is growing an growing cannot afford it that information about an unreleased product is leaking out by their own retail store employees.

Here's how you violate an NDA. First, are you a partner of it? Employees of AppleStore are not. As a Select Developer who has signed more than a couple of NDA's with Apple, I am. Are AppleStore employees allowed to download NDA software from Apple's sites? No. So they are fired. Stupid of them to blab about what they were doing.

If I had to guess they will probably let most of the people in question go based on attendance, as it seems to be the selective enforcement tool of choice by most managers in getting rid of people they are "done" with... and it sort of sidesteps a lot of potential HR issues at the same time

I used to work for Apple Retail (the glory days, sigh...), and I can't fathom someone there having been stupid enough to brag about illegally obtaining any software, much less Apple's own stuff.

Something about discretion being the better part of valor comes to mind.

No sympathy either. Our NDA would apply here because they probably used BitTorrent, right? So they were uploading as well as downloading. Discussing as-yet-unreleased software in a public place (the Store) also violates the terms of the NDA.
If you work at Apple and pirate their software, you're a jerk in the first place (it's stealing from the company you work for, after all) , but if you're indiscreet enough to talk about it, you don't deserve to work there.

Employees will be given access to the product when the time is right. They company will ensure that they will be able to hype it to customers with a sensible, controlled approach.

These idiots clearly did something wrong, and got caught out. No sympathy for idiots.

apparantly, this has happened before. i know of a couple of people that were supposedly fired because of downloading software after their store manager gave them the verbal OK, but denied it later on. and that was from an internal server that hosted the applications for anyone to download without any authorization or authentication protocols in place.

i also know of similar situations like the above one that occured, but the "investigation" was dropped.

 is huge now and everyone wants everything before it is out. maybe if  made it available for their employees to try before it comes out, they would actually know about the product before the day it came out.

i know this from 4 years of experience with the company

Stealing and copyright infringement are not the same thing under the law. They're not the same morally, either, unless your soul belongs to The Corporation.

umm ... downloading pirated software is illegal and is stealing. Most people get fired for stealing. What's so difficult to understand?