Score one for Yahoo, it seems, getting some key private equity firms to sign its restrictive non-disclosure agreement to allow them a special peek at its business.

And now that includes Silver Lake, which has already had several discussions with Yahoo management and its board members, including co-founder Jerry Yang.

Silver Lake, which has perhaps been among the more aggressive of the possible bidders for Yahoo, had been a significant holdout over the NDA, because of provisions it felt were too onerous.

That included restricting “cross-talk” among the variety of suitors interested. Sources said Silver Lake had been discussing various scenarios related to Yahoo that might take a consortium of players to realize.

It seems it will agree to none of that, for now at least, joining several others who have also signed on the dotted line of secrecy. While Yahoo could have agreed to changes in the NDA, sources said the one Silver Lake agreed to was the same as others previously signed.

Those NDA-ready PE firms include TPG Capital and KKR. As of today, other bidders — such as Providence Equity Partners, Bain Capital, Blackstone and Hellman & Friedman — have not yet signed the document.

Yahoo had extended a deadline for doing to into this week, but firms can also get involved in later rounds of talks.

In addition, signing the NDA is not the end of the road for those who do not — Yahoo is a prominent public company and there are plenty of sources to talk to about its prospects.

But getting cooperation of Yahoo management could be critical, unless a bidder is contemplating making an unsolicited offer.

And that would be a tough road — just ask Microsoft.

Most of all, getting everyone to sign is important for Yahoo, which wants to control any sales or investment process and wants to avoid bidders taking control of its fate.

Thus, Silver Lake accepting the NDA is a big deal, since it had been considering hooking up with China’s Alibaba Group in a possible bid for all or part of Yahoo.

In addition, it has had success in a smaller but similar scenario around Internet telephony giant Skype, which it eventually sold to Microsoft for a lucrative upside.

As with Skype, Silver Lake is still working with Andreessen Horowitz, as I had previously reported. In fact, principal Marc Andreessen was present in a recent informational meeting Silver Lake had with Yahoo’s Yang.

I asked Silver Lake for comment about the NDA, bur it, um, deflected my swooping inquiry (inside joke alert!).

Many years ago, before Google went public, I had an unusual late-night conversation in the lobby of the TED conference with its co-founder Larry Page about the prospect, about which–despite its inevitability–he had more than a little nervousness.

That would be: Taking the search company public.

After much ruminating, Page concluded that one of the more important reasons he felt compelled to have an IPO was to finally reward Google’s employees for all the work they had done to build the company.

While I have never had a similar chat with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the powerful social networking company and an initial public offering, I suspect that he would not express any such sentiment.

And it’s not because Zuckerberg does not value his staffers any less than Page did–instead, it’s because he seems to value his privacy most of all.

I know–ironic!–given how many perceive the company to be cavalier about important issues related to disclosures of personal information uploaded to Facebook by the mountain-load daily by its hundreds of millions of users.

That aside, Zuckerberg’s clear intent to keep the lid on Facebook tight–with no information about the details of financial performance and other pertinent information a public offering would require be disclosed–is clearly about to become a nettlesome issue for the company.

While that effort at preserving secrecy by staying private has resulted in little more than cute Silicon Valley media guessing games about a possible IPO, its most recent machinations are too clever by a half.

That would be the new and giant investment from Goldman Sachs, as well as a deal to get $1.5 billion of pre-IPO shares in the hands of the investment bank’s rich customers.

Aside from the appalling image that only the very wealthy can get an early shot at Facebook shares, which instantly became a press meme yesterday after the Goldman deal was announced, pretending this single investment entity–called a “special purpose vehicle”–simply feels like a Wall Street trick.

Plus, a special purpose vehicle sounds like a car that bankers use to take people for a ride.

Thus, a gaggle of rich doctors in New Jersey are treated like one blob, instead of what is plainly true to all. As the old Latin legal phrase goes: Res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself).

Of course, this strategic move is designed to keep the number of primary stockholders under 500, which is the IPO tipping point for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Therefore, by all means, let’s do it!

Or not, because I had an intense déjà vu about all this, and an unease that it felt vaguely familiar as a negative characteristic of Zuckerberg’s leadership that seems to cling to him.

That would be the dicey origins of Facebook, which remain a controversy to this day, including garnering an entire Hollywood movie on the subject.

Anyone with a passing knowledge of Facebook’s history knows the basic question: Did Mark Zuckerberg “steal” the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins, as well as sandbag their efforts, while they were all students at Harvard University?

And, more to the point, was it illegal?

The Winklevii certainly think so, continuing in their Don Quixote quest to take Zuckerberg down in a series of ever-more-comical lawsuits.

For me, the answer is a lot more complex–I think Zuckerberg most definitely screwed with the Olympic rowing twins and it was very creepy that he did.

But, in terms of breaking the law, not so much.

Of course, if you are endeavoring to always act with ethics in your career, this should not be the bar set. But in practical terms, it was most definitely an aggressive knee-capping that is not uncommon in business.

Zuckerberg has shown similar tendencies many times since then, especially around the thorny issues of privacy, where fast-and-loose behaviors are quickly followed by the I’m-sorry-I-didn’t-mean-it excuses.

Okay, fine, I get it. Business is war.

But, as it moves into a more mature place, the question now is whether Facebook should keep stressing this kind of wink-wink-nudge-nudge propensity, because it feels–how can I say this in the nicest way–icky.

Plus it will surely attract unneeded attention from the SEC, which is already looking into the opaque market for trading shares of closely held companies and where Facebook is the star attraction.

And this is to say nothing of other issues–for example, could there be insider trading problems around the buying and selling of these private shares, as one person close to the situation has noted to me?

Facebook, of course, will defend what it is doing as above board, say it’s not unfair to give special access to its bounty to the very rich in what is essentially a private IPO and wag a finger at critics like me and tell us we don’t understand sophisticated financial issues.

But here’s what I grok without a Harvard Business School degree: It feels sneaky, it feels elite, it feels opaque, and this kind of fancy financing footwork could end in tears.

Because these legitimate questions on how Facebook handles its stock will continue to dog the company until–when he is good and ready (and finances at Facebook look prettier)–Zuckerberg eventually pulls the trigger on an IPO.

It would be nice, even if Wall Street applauds his cleverness, if he didn’t keep shooting himself in the foot along the way.

In his memo, Hustinx criticizes the secrecy of the talks from which ACTA arose and worries that as an international treaty to fight digital piracy, the agreement is in danger of running afoul of European Union privacy and data protection law requirements.

“Privacy and data protection must be taken into account from the very beginning of the negotiations, not when the schemes and procedures have been defined and agreed and it is therefore too late to find alternative, privacy compliant solutions,” Hustinx wrote.

“While intellectual property is important to society and must be protected,” he added, “it should not be placed above individuals’ fundamental rights to privacy, data protection, and other rights such as presumption of innocence, effective judicial protection and freedom of expression.”

Evidently, that’s exactly where IP has been placed in the current draft of ACTA, which seems to be designed to encourage ISPs to monitor their customers’ Internet use for illegal file-sharing and potentially, to blackball repeat offenders on their networks.

“Insofar as the current draft of ACTA includes or at least indirectly pushes for three strikes Internet disconnection policies, ACTA would profoundly restrict the fundamental rights and freedoms of European citizens, most notably the protection of personal data and privacy,” Hustinx wrote.

“The EDPS takes the view that three strikes Internet disconnection policies are not necessary to achieve the purpose of enforcing intellectual property rights,” he concluded. “The EDPS is convinced that alternative, less intrusive solutions exist or, at least, that the envisaged policies can be performed in a less intrusive manner or at a more limited scope, notably through the form of targeted ad hoc monitoring.”

“As a company deeply involved in the digitization of education and business information, we were as interested as anyone in the launch of the new device, although we were never part of the launch event and never in a position to confirm details about the device ahead of time,” Steven Weiss, VP of Corporate Communications for The McGraw-Hill Companies said in a statement given to Digital Daily.

“On Tuesday afternoon Mr. McGraw appeared on CNBC in a wide ranging interview to discuss our earnings announcement and growth projections for 2010. His speculative comments about Apple’s pending launch, which he shared earlier in the day in a call with investors, were simply intended to suggest that if the new device were to use iPhone applications, many of our education products would be compatible with the technology and could be made easily available on it.”

Concluding, Weiss wrote, “Unfortunately, it seems that many mistakenly interpreted his comments as being more specific to yesterday’s announcement. It is also important to note that only the products of trade publishers were featured in the launch event. Our digital education programs are not in that category and were never part of those negotiations.”

It would seem, then, that contrary to other reports making the rounds, McGraw-Hill was not abruptly excised from Apple (AAPL) CEO Steve Jobs’s presentation yesterday after Terry McGraw’s disclosure on CNBC. And indeed, multiple sources close to the situation say that the CEO was not given a demo of the iPad before its launch and that McGraw-Hill (MHP) was never intended to be part of iPad launch event in San Francisco.

In retrospect, all McGraw really did on CNBC was to recycle and recast some comments made during the company’s Tuesday morning earnings conference call. Reading over those remarks, it seems plausible that he was simply excitedly regurgitating the same collection of rumor and speculation we all were during the run-up to the launch event.
 
“In the near future, you will undoubtedly see a McGraw-Hill e-book for the college market running on an Apple tablet,” McGraw said during the company’s earnings call. “All our titles on CourseSmart, the industry e-book consortium, are already available to students on an iPhone operating system. That’s because CourseSmart developed an iPhone application last summer with support from Apple. The goal was to have core educational content available on the iPhone operating system, which also makes it possible for e-books to run on new Apple devices using that system.”
 
Continuing, McGraw said, “Consider then the Apple tablet computer, which will be introduced shortly. There is a lot of secrecy about the introduction, but many expect that the Apple device will use the iPhone operating system. If that’s the case, we are confident that our CourseSmart e-books should run well right out of the box on any Apple Tablet. Stay tuned.”

Similar to what he told CNBC, right? Thing is, McGraw spoke with quite a bit more certainty during that interview. He said:

“Yes, they’ll make their announcement tomorrow on this one. We have worked with Apple for quite a while. And the Tablet is going to be based on the iPhone operating system and so it will be transferable.”

Those remarks don’t seem entirely speculative to me. Still, what was McGraw saying that we hadn’t already heard before? Maybe he reads the rumor sites too.