In the dog days of a hot American summer, the tech journalism and blogging community are being made to sweat a little more than usual. Or at least that is the theory, after a judge in a long-running and high-profile patent infringement case between Oracle and Google asked both companies to disclose which writers they pay for consultancy or favourable opinions.

It is not exactly clear why the district judge William Alsup decided to order the companies to surrender any names of journalists, bloggers or commentators they might have a financial relationship with who could have commented on the case. But the companies are bound to comply by Friday. The scope of the order is incredibly wide and might therefore even include bloggers who take ads from Google on their blogs.

One intellectual property blogger, Florian Müller, disclosed that he had become a consultant for Oracle shortly after the trial had begun, but no other similar disclosures have been made. It could be that the court order has had a similar effect to peeling back just the corner of a can full of hyperactive worms.

The need for transparency about the press's "soft power" is not a new issue, and neither is the tension between public commentary and private remuneration. In journalism there is a clear line drawn against accepting bribes for good coverage, and a hard legal line against writing up financial information when owning the company's shares; but then there is a vast grey area of ethical ambiguity in between.

The larger, more transparent organisations such as the BBC, the New York Times and the Guardian all apply clear guidelines. But even here, the issue of what constitutes a good contact (as opposed to someone who is too close to a journalist) is unclear: you declare financial interests, gifts, trips, political affiliations, but what about friendships, family connections or social leverage?

The ethics of journalism are built partly on cultural grounds and partly on commercial grounds. If you run an organisation which relies on advertising and people to pay for journalism, or for funding from taxes and foundations, then ethical transgression undermines your revenues. Look at News Corporation: the phone-hacking scandal in effect bounced the News of the World into closure, and was certainly a factor in disentangling publishing from the rest of the company.

The remaking of journalism, commentary and commercial relationships with media has not so much redrawn these lines but temporarily rubbed them out. Silicon Valley and the technology sector have been particularly affected by this for two reasons: the money and the stakes are high for companies, which have raised funding often on the back of reputation and word-of-mouth rather than established revenues; and the business models for journalism are no longer an incentive to keep an ethical clean sheet, when compared to a steady income stream from a number of tech companies.

This time last year, the Valley was caught up in the protracted exit of the leading tech blogger Michael Arrington from TechCrunch, the site he founded and sold to AOL. One key issue was Arrington's investment in companies he wrote about and his intention to start a venture capital fund while still running the site – his closeness to his subjects gave him a string of exclusives. TechCrunch certainly pushed the boundaries of what many deemed ethically acceptable.

The Google v Oracle disclosures will be closely watched. But this is one thread of a much more complex problem. As the power of individual journalists' words rises, salaries paid by journalistic institutions fall. The only real answer is increased transparency about the sources of information, and about individual and corporate payments; and for the sake of all concerned it would be better for this to come from within organisations, rather than from a court order.