First, I am not a lawyer.
There’s a big kerfuffle going on right now on the Tubes around the search and seizure of equipment from the home of one of the editors of Gizmodo. The digerati and the Twitterverse are aghast that such a breach of “ethics” has happened and are all leaping to the defense of Jason Chen, the editor in question. It hasn’t yet been compared to the Pentagon Papers, but like the comparison of someone to Hitler, it is inevitable that someone will overreach.
There’s a few things that I’d like to observe. Things which seem obvious to me, but I’m obviously in the minority of those currently kerfuffling. First, the person who “found” the iPhone obviously knew it was valuable. If not initially, certainly after a short period. Otherwise, how would he know to try and sell it to a website as a “scoop”?
From everything I’ve read — and I could easily be wrong — it would seem that the finder never tried to return it to the bar, or contact anyone at the bar in order to make the connection to the person who lost it. Also, he likely (although there’s no evidence yet) knew it was valuable and intended to profit from it.
Gizmodo knew that they were buying this iPhone prototype from someone who was not the legal owner of it. Finally, if this was anyone but Apple people wouldn’t be defending him.
On that last point, let’s take this into a totally different realm so that people might understand the kind of intellectual property that is being discussed here. Let’s say that an engineer at Ford was out testing a as-yet-unreleased vehicle. Furthermore, let’s say that said engineer wandered off for an extended period, and left the keys in the ignition. If someone drove the car off and sold it to Car & Driver, would you think it ethical? Moral? Legal? What if he sold it to GM?
Again, I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t seem to find any “public good” that is involved here. To me, it’s no different than if the National Inquirer purchased Tom Hanks’ cell phone so they could rummage through it and publish the information found in it. It was done for one reason, and one reason only: to drive advertising revenue and profit.