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Judge Orders Gizmodo Search Warrant Unsealed
gyrogeerloose writes "The same judge who issued the warrant to search Gizmodo editor Jason Chen's apartment has now ordered it unsealed, ruling against the San Mateo County district attorney's office which had argued that unsealing the documents may compromise the investigation."
You can read the entire affidavit here (PDF). It has a detailed description of the police investigation that led to the seizure of Chen's computers. It turns out Steve Jobs personally requested that the phone be returned, prompting Gizmodo's Brian Lam to try negotiating for a public acknowledgment that the phone was real. Apple was tipped off to the man who found/stole the prototype by his roommate.
I'm sure getting the house raided and the guy near arrested tops that.
Not according to Steve Jobs ;-)
She did it to avoid getting caught up in the rest of this sht. Seems like she was the only one who thought that this could come back to bite them in the ass. She was right.
I prefer not to live with people who have no problem with "finding" other peoples' property. You have to invest in big locks.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It turns out Steve Jobs personally requested that the phone be returned, prompting Gizmodo's Brian Lam to try negotiating for a public acknowledgment that the phone was real.
Let me make sure I understand this: these guys were in possession of stolen property, and they tried to negotiate conditions for its return? Gizmodo, you run a decent gadget blog, but Jesus Christ you need better lawyers. You are about to be one-two punched by the law, and you have no one to blame but yourselves.
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Whilst you and your hoodie friends might not realise it, stealing a cell phone *is* a crime.
Read the part where the cops were allowed a warrantless entry into 247 Hillview. Dumb move. Hogan, by cooperating with the cops, ended up getting his own cell phone seized. He also ended up implicating himself. No warrant, no search. No statements unless legal counsel is present, who will tell you to SHUT YOUR F*ING MOUTH! Because nothing you say can be used to help you, but it can and will be used against you, as this case demonstrates.
Not to mention that you can't use a digital camera to "make a copy of the phone". It's a digital camera, not a replicator.
Seems to me that her roommates are the ones acting in bad faith here by using her computer while dealing with something that is obviously of shady legal ground.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
"But to his defense he can claim he was trying to verify ownership of the item."
No he can't. He specifically requested that the recognition be made *public*. Ownership could easily be verified privately, and even this was unnecessary because Gizmodo had already established to their own satisfaction that it really was an Apple device. He wanted *public* recognition for his own personal gain, and he suggests that he is unwilling to return property that he knows belongs to Apple unless he gets that recognition.
So in summary:
1. An Apple employee lost a prototype at a bar
2. A college student obtained the phone, became aware of its owner by looking at the Facebook app on the phone, yet made no effort to contact the owner. He further violated California law by failing to turn it over to the bar's proprietor (the place where the true owner was most likely to look), the police, or make truly reasonable attempts to contact Apple. Therefore, under California law, THIS WAS A STOLEN PHONE.
3. Gizmodo purchased the phone with the obvious hope that it was in fact stolen (in the sense that they hoped they would be able to discern that it truly belonged to Apple and would be able to use it for their own benefit before returning it.) After discerning that it belonged to Apple, they published information that was highly damaging to Apple's sales and their advantage over their competitors. Even though they were admittedly SURE that it was an Apple product, they were hesitant to return it until they got PUBLIC (not PRIVATE) acknowledgment, once again for their own personal benefit.
Solution? Asshole student who found the phone goes to prison. Asshole "journalist" who bought a device with the hope that it was stolen and the intent to use it for his own benefit goes to prison. Gawker Media is held liable for civil damages to Apple--likely they go bankrupt because of it.
They're all criminals, they should all pay.
Whilst you and your hoodie friends might not realise it, stealing a cell phone *is* a crime.
A crime that deserves worldwide news coverage that goes on for weeks and weeks? Please.
Next week, maybe we'll see 5,000 stories on Google news about how somebody stole a lawnmower.
Please tell how you would go about putting a value on a prototype.
Well, Gizmodo paid $8500 for a _stolen_ prototype, opening them up for all kinds of risks. How much would Apple have received if they had started an auction for one iPhone prototype to the highest bidder? There were offers from other outfits for $10,000 (which were retracted when these guys figured out the phone was stolen). So obviously Apple had no intention to sell that prototype, but they could easily have sold it for say $20,000 to $50,000.
Or lets say Apple has a big event when the next iPhone is released, and one lucky journalist in the audience wins a real iPhone prototype (no trade secret anymore because it is the event of the actual release, just the rarity). You could probably sell that prototype for a few thousand.
No. If the circumstances would have led a reasonable person to conclude that the item they were buying did not belong to the seller, nor that the seller was an agent of its owner, then they were buying stolen goods. Whether the owner has claimed it was stolen is just irrelevant--the owner doesn't even need to be aware that they've lost the item.
Think about it. You go on a backpacking trip to Europe, and your uncle the drunk stays at your house in the meantime. Some dude steals your car and abandons it at an isolated road, and your uncle doesn't even notice. Another guy finds your car, finds identification that ties the car to you in the glovebox, and drives it to your home to return it to you. But when they get there, your drunken uncle tells him that you don't have a car, and to fuck off. Does the guy now get to sell your car?
In the end, Gizmodo reported that they bought a phone for $5,000 from a guy that they knew neither owned it nor was an agent of the owner. That's basically an admission of a felony.
Are you adequate?
Jobs is going to end up (if not already) looking like a real jerk in this whole case. He just needs to swallow his pride and leave well enough alone. Apple will gain nothing by taking revenge on these people. And it is revenge. Sad.
The thief, Brian Hogan, was asked by his friends to return the phone, because the loss would likely destroy the career of Gray Powell. His answer: "Sucks for him. He lost his phone. Shouldn't have lost his phone." So to Brian Hogan I would say "Sucks for you. You stole the phone. Shouldn't have stolen the phone".
I'm afraid you don't know the law, not to mention morals. If you take a cell phone that doesn't belong to you from a bar, and neither return it to the person/company you know it belongs to, nor to the police, you have stolen it.
There is no evidence been presented of ANY attempt to return it. But even if there was a phone call to Apple tech support, and Apple tech support knew nothing about the phone, that doesn't make it the "finder's" property to sell. Many other reasonable avenues were open to return it to the owner or the police, none were taken. Instead it was sold as stolen property.
Don't ignore it. If you want to behave like you have no respect for the law, and back a thief rather than the victim, then the name fits. You could have "wannabe gangsta" instead if you prefer.
Yes. This is a serious theft of a valuable item.
People who've had valuable items stolen from them are not deserving of the police investigating?
Come back when you've grown a sense of morality.
And in their first article after taking the device they published Powell's name, suggesting they knew as well...
Which really undermines their "we were trying to find the original owner and return it to him" story. If both Gizmodo and the "finder" really wanted to return the phone, (besides turning it to the bar or the police) they could have just drove up to Apple's campus and left it at the front desk. "This belongs to one of your employees, Powell"
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
How much was it worth to Apple's competitors (such as RIM, Samsung, Nokia, etc.) to find out that Apple's next phone had a front facing camera? That it had a flash? Getting an extra 2 or 3 months head start on that information could be very important. It could be the difference between their next models coming out with the same features, or having to wait an extra product cycle to match Apple's new features.
And that difference, those phone sales, could easily run into the millions.
It's one thing with an analyst says "I think Apple will do X". It's quite different when someone finds an Apple device that does X just two to three months before it will be released (based on Apple's summer iPhone release pattern).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
That seems like a lot of police work, DA work, etc for a piece of shit phone. People will cry about IP and lost sales. Bull shit. Steve Jobs says people will stop buying iPhones because they now know a new one is in development? Are you fucking kidding me Steve? You guys release a new model every fucking year. Only a dipshit retard wouldn't know that July is new iPhone month.
My neighbor beats her daughter and locks her in a closet and we call the Police, children's services, and they blow us the fuck off. To busy with real crimes like a missing iPhone.
Sad. Get a fucking grip people.
Apple also told the police that the publication of Gizmodo's story was "immensely damaging" to the company, because consumers would stop buying current generation iPhones in anticipation of the upcoming product. Asked the value of the phone, Apple told the police "it was invaluable."
As far as I'm concerned they're both thieves. But, that's just me.
-[d]-
First of all, I haven't seen anything that says that Gizmodo or Hogan ever talked to Powell. Citation, please.
But that's not my main point. The main point is that, god, I feel like we're talking to second-graders here. Here's some very elementary moral rules that we adults teach kids in, um, elementary school:
This is all part of basic respect for other people's property. People who follow those rules don't run into trouble with the law when they find other people's lost property. Such people, finding a lost cellphone, would look through the contents of the phone to try and identify the owner or somebody who knows the owner, and then try to return within a couple of days. If they were unsuccesful in their attempts to return it, they wouldn't claim it for their own before consulting the law. What they wouldn't do is start using the phone for their own personal calls for a whole month before returning it, because that's wrong.
If Hogan and Gizmodo had followed those elementary rules, well, they'd be clear. Hogan might have started like that on night 1 (using the phone to find out the name of the guy who lost it), but it's becoming pretty clear by this point that as he realized the value of the prototype, he stopped following those rules, and his priority became how to benefit from somebody else's property, not how to return it to them.
Are you adequate?