I think "moral clarity" over this kind of thing was lost decades ago, when it became common for companies to buy/borrow/find prototypes, and rarely prosecuted. It's common knowledge among chip-design companies that as soon as your prototype board hits the fab (unless you're someone like IBM or Intel with your own fabs), it's going to be in your competitor's hands: NVidia and ATI operate on the assumption that as soon as a chip's sent to Taiwan, it's going to their competitor too. Nobody is ever prosecuted for that, either, on the side of the seller or on the side of the buyer.

Yes, technically selling found property is a crime, but morally, this looks more like a trade-secret dispute between businesses than a normal stolen-property dispute, i.e. the harms suffered are not primarily the loss of the device, but of the secret information. And I think people are pretty jaded when it comes to inter-business trade-secret/corporate-espionage sorts of disputes, because it happens all the time and nobody important ever goes to jail for it, even though there's a lot of wink-wink in which executives are aware of it.

The main difference here seems that it was made public instead of kept secret, and the people doing it were amateurs. If Gizmodo were a consulting firm instead of tabloid, paid $5k to see the prototype for a bit, took a bunch of photos and information, quietly returned it or didn't, and then quietly sold that info to one of Apple's competitors, we probably would never have heard of it. (There's a whole little cottage industry doing teardowns of "found" hardware.) I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs himself has purchased such information at some point in his long business career--- taking care to maintain plausible deniability of course.

I wonder... if Gizmodo had informed Apple of the contact, might Apple have given them an exclusive deal further down the line for doing the right thing? Were I Jobs, I certainly would (though I'm not); people who will look out for you & yours are valuable to keep. That kind of better relations may have been worth more than the phone scoop, and certainly better than the horrendous PR snafu (it would've been the other way around, most likely: Apple fans praising Gizmodo).

Moral clarity about crime? I didn't see anything clearing my morals in the article. Yes, it was illegal (and probably should be so too) to sell/buy stolen prototype, but illegal and (morally) wrong are completely different things in my book. I my mind, the scales are tipping on the "morally good" side in this case, but I also think that Gizmondo should accept the quite predictable consequences.

The only thing that bothers me is the method of executing the search on Mr. Chen. In this case, it's not like he has ever been hiding anything, so did they need to bust in his door, execute a search warrant, and seize his computers?

It seems to me that the facts of this case are all public, and if they want to prosecute him, they could have done so without resorting to thuggish tactics.

"if David were to steal Goliath’s slingshot. . ."

I just don't even know where to begin.

> Finally, there’s the misguided idea, long espoused by many in the tech community, that “information wants to be free.” But whether it’s in the form of proprietary trade secrets embodied by Apple’s latest iPhone or intellectual property subject to seemingly endless illegal downloading and file sharing every second of every day, information is not free.

> It takes a lot of time and energy and money to write books, compose music, create movies, and design and market electronic devices like iPhones. Such information deserves legal protection, even when it’s been lost in a bar.

weird how he twists this to support an entirely different conclusion at the end. also i don't think the real issue here is whether or not there was theft. it seems pretty clear there was. the question is has the response to it been proportionate and "by the book", or has steve pulled strings?

This author doesn't seem to have researched his piece very well. Take the shield law argument. He says:

The problem for Gizmodo is that the shield law has a specific exemption when the police are looking for evidence that the journalists (in this case, the Gizmodo editor) themselves committed crimes, as seems to be the case here.

But almost every investigative reporter breaks a law when doing their job. Woodward and Bernstein received documents that were unquestionably stolen. That's receiving stolen property (not to mention violation of a bunch of laws regarding state secrets)

The argument against Gizmodo is whether the story "served the public good" as established by the precedent. NOT if they committed a crime themselves.

>By making an admittedly weak effort to return the iPhone to Apple, Hogan – in the eyes of the law – committed theft.

That's the thing though. Gizmodo did in fact return the iPhone to Apple without complaint, in a timely manner. Posting the information to the Internet is an unorthodox way of asking Apple if they want their property returned, but it ultimately has the same result.

If any crime was committed by Gizmodo, it is theft of trade secrets, not theft of the device.

Could Gizmodo have avoided legal jeopardy if they had used that $5000 to secure an exclusive instead of using it to buy the device?

Who has the story about our software engineer? Talk about hangover after birthday party...

This article makes a bunch of assumptions. The most important assumption is that they guy who found the phone didn't make a reasonable effort to return it.

Just because the phone says "Apple" on the back, doesn't mean Apple owns it. My phone says that too, but I wouldn't want it sent to Apple if I lost it. Also, my understanding was that the phone was bricked remotely. Not much you can do to find the owner of a phone that doesn't turn on.

It would seem to me that this assumption must be proven true before police can take action against Chen, since unless this assumption is true, there is no cause to invade his office.

I don't know what the facts are, but the they need to be set straight in this matter before we declare anyone guilty.