Offering tipsters “complete anonymity,” the website contact page urges visitors to submit “news tips” and “insider information.”

According to the complaint, Apple employees sign confidentiality agreements in which they promise not to disclose information about product plans to anyone outside of the company.

“Defendants’ knowing misappropriation and disclosure of Apple’s trade secrets constitutes a violation of California law and has caused irreparable harm to Apple,” the lawsuit states.

But several experts said that Apple might have alternative motives for suing the site.

“Usually you would want to sue your enemies and not your friends,” said Gary Fine, a Northwestern professor of sociology and expert on rumors. “I can’t think of an instance in which a corporation would sue its own fans. I haven’t heard anything like this.”

Fine said that it was possible that Apple was suing Think Secret to generate publicity. The lawsuit came the week before Apple’s biannual exposition where it released its latest products.

“If [the lawsuit] gets everyone’s attention, that’s all for the good of the company. Maybe there is a quiet understanding that they’ll get media attention and [then] quietly drop the lawsuit,” Fine said.

Ciarelli denied speculation that his site collaborated with Apple to generate buzz.

“Apple’s leadership is not feeding me information,” he wrote in an e-mail.

Roger M. Milgrim, a New York intellectual property attorney and the author of Milgrim on Trade Secrets, said that Apple might be trying to scare off other sites from copying Think Secret’s tactics.

“They figure that if they place financial pressures on this fellow, they’ll stop others from doing this same,” said Milgrim, who was unfamiliar with the case. “A preliminary injunction issued by a California court is useless against a Massachusetts or New York resident. But they seek damages and this young man will have to appear and he will have to hire a lawyer.”

Milgrim and Harvard Law Professor Lloyd L. Weinreb, when told by a Crimson reporter about the case, said Ciarelli might have a difficult time defending his actions.

“If that student is inviting people to give him information that was violating a trade secret he might be liable as a contributory infringer,” Weinreb said. An infringer violates the law directly, but a contributory infringer knows about the infringement and facilitates it in some way.

Milgrim agreed, saying that even if Ciarelli had not solicited trade secrets but had simply posted them, he might still be liable under California law.

“California is one of approximately 44 or 45 states that have adopted [the] Uniform Trade Secrets Act. That statute makes it wrongful to acquire or publish without authorization information you know or have a reasonable basis to know is a trade secret of another,” Milgrim said.