Apple and Nicholas M. Ciarelli, the young man behind the popular Apple rumors web site ThinkSecret.com, announced on Thursday that they eventually reached a settlement and that ThinkSecret.com would shut down.

In January 2005 Nicholas Ciarelli, currently a senior at Harvard, was sued by Apple because he was reportedly publishing trade secrets on his ThinkSecret.com web site. Excepting Ciarelli, the company sued in court other two web sites’ publishers over similar charges. But Apple lost these two other lawsuits, as the court decided that the web sites’ publishers were journalists and thus, protected by law; Apple was forces to pay $700,000 in legal fees to the web sites.

However, the company’s lawsuit against Nicholas Ciarelli didn’t ended too soon, although in March 2005 the young man filed a countermotion against Apple under a California provision that makes litigants vulnerable to financial damages if they sue over what is determined to be constitutionally protected speech. According Ciarelli’s lawyer, Terry Gross, it seems that the motion would have resulted in another embarrassing ruling against Apple and this is in fact what led to this week’s settlement.

Although Ciarelli did not comment on whether the giant company had given him money to shut down his web site, the young publisher said he was pleased with the outcome of the negotiations. “We’ve been able to reach a positive solution,” he also said.

Ciarelli also claimed that this settlement with Apple represented a clear statement about the rights of online journalists: “Speaking more broadly, I think online journalists can feel confident that they can assert their First Amendment rights, even when they run up against large corporations.” Still, he agreed to shut down ThinkSecret.com and this fact was seen by other free speech advocates as a partial victory for a large company that tried to silence an independent voice. “It’s great for the individual critic to be paid to be quiet, but the public is worse off if we lose the ability to get more information in the marketplace of ideas,” said Paul Alan Levy, a lawyer with the Public Citizen Litigation Group in Washington.

Interestingly enough, none of Nicholas Ciarelli’s sources were revealed as part of the “amicable” settlement.