Slashdot Mirror
Should Snatching an iPhone Be a Felony?
theodp writes "English comedian Russell Brand could be facing a felony conviction for snatching an iPhone from a would-be paparazzi and tossing it through a window. Singer/parolee Chris Brown also found himself in iPhone hot water after being charged with 'robbery by snatching' in a similar DIY-paparazzi-thwarting incident, which could be a misdemeanor or felony depending on the value placed on an iPhone. But in the world-of-crazy-pricing created by phone makers and wireless providers ($899 Nokia Windows Phone, anyone?), where the quoted price of an iPhone varies by a factor of 376 from the same company, should one really be charged with a felony for snatching an iPhone, especially when an iPad 2 can be had for $399 retail?"
This is no different than pick pocketing someone.
Usually stealing something directly from someone's person is a serious offense no matter how worthless it is.
Hell, if force is used it becomes robbery.
Nothing to see here, move along.
It's already a felony in basically every democratic city in the world to snatch whatever private property someone else owns, and tossing it away like that (out the window).
It's not yours, so you can't snatch it, it's that simple. Nothing complex about it.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Maybe. When I mean 'maybe' I mean maybe when I'm pissing off random thieves on the street by shoving my phone in their face repeatedly until I get a reaction.
Maybe then.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Why is this a question?
Might as well punch the paparazzi in the face...
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
See http://www.ted.com/talks/rob_reid_the_8_billion_ipod.html . Perhaps the iPhone is worth $8 billion (I mean, you are technically stealing every song on the iPhone as well as the phone itself).
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
1. Wear something copyrighted.
2. Sue the paparazzi for copyright infringement.
3. PROFIT!!!!
This is not about an iPhone being thrown around, it's about someone else's property being damaged in excess of $500 and that being a felony in Louisiana. Whoopdeedoo, big deal.
There is already too much crime. Civil liability should be enough. If it's unprovoked, simple battery might be in order. But felony?
Stop being so damn blood-thirsty. Breaking somebody's device because they shove it in your face should not ruin lives and occupations.
Are the paparazzi carrying the accessories of that bundle? Individually bought the Purity HD headset is about 150-200$ and the Play360 speaker maybe 100-150$. Slantdot editing at it's finest.
The price of the phone is not what makes it valuable or its loss dangerous. That's like considering the price of the paper to determine the severity of the offense of the hold-up note to a bank teller.
I hate apple
Replace "iPhone" with "phone" or "mobile" or "smartphone" and absolutely nothing relevant changes.
That's it, though, isn't it? The story doesn't even involve Apple or its products save that it incidentally happened to be the brand of the specific stolen overpriced electronic toy. Hell, no iPad's were involved at all, and yet this click-bait summary managed to work them in anyhow all while mentioning that you can get one for less than the well-publicized $499!
When I clicked the check box to disable advertising I didn't expect the ads to reappear as articles. This is getting ridiculous.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I wish we could give a -1 Troll to articles themselves.
In the style of the worst newspapers, the Daily Mail start with the result they want and steer all discourse towards it, even if it means twisting and lying along the path. They will just make it up if they need to do so, and there have been a lot of cases where this has happened!
People worked hard for many hours to buy their iPhone... to just dismiss this as a trivial offense is shocking to me.
The interesting thing here is that the iPhone may have enough value to make this a felony, but his privacy has no value at all. Paparazzi can follow and harass him all they like and he can do nothing about it. Now you might not have sympathy for celebs, but they do the same thing to mothers of murder victims and others. A (British) paparazzi only today followed the mother of one of the dead Belgium schoolchildren (coach crash in Switzerland) to get 'sad mother' shot.
IMHO, throwing a paparazzi camera out of a window should have no more value than the damage to the phone. It was NOT THEFT, he can go get his phone, it was not assault, he did not hit the Paparazzi. It was not a mugging, no threat of violence was used. I don't even rank this the same as taking a normal persons phone and throwing it out the window because the Paparazzi was the person who came into close proximity and shoved the camea phone in his face.
He didn't go seek out the Paparazzi, the reason they're in conflict is entirely the Paparazzi actions.
So it's a misdemeanor since it's paparazzi, or possibly a 'jolley jape'.
Apparently felony was abolished in the Criminal Law Act 1967 in England and Wales "which made all felonies (except treason) misdemeanours". Arrestable offences were abolished in 2006.
Maybe it should be considered an act of sacrilege.
I'm not an Apple fan, but an iPhone is not overpriced for the amount of quality design and hardware you get for it, and it's not a toy - it's a powerful portable computer that can do some impressive and useful things. A Tonka truck is an example of a toy, in case you've forgotten how to describe things without hyperbole.
I remember when Linux was good... too...
Obviously, stopping a paparazzi is in public interest. Freeing somebody from an iPhone clearly is too. So IMO, this should result in a public commendation, and if needed in a psych-eval for the former iPhone owner to determine whether there is any residual damage that could mandate putting them into a closed psychiatric facility to protect the public.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
no really, its a toy.
If I connect an ipad to my desktop, windows detects it as an "entertainment device"
Stealing an item of personal property is larceny. Add the use of force or fear and it's robbery. Robbery is always a felony because of the inherent risk that someone could be injured or killed. That's why Jerry Dewayne Williams is serving 25-to-life for stealing a slice of pizza.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This brings to mind a current activist motion to defeat the US injustice system by demanding a speedy trial
And it also illustrates the stupidity of that suggestion. He can choose between a plea bargain for a misdemeanor and pay a small fine, or try to be an "activist" and face certain conviction for a felony.
It's not clear to me what cause he would be supporting by demanding a trial though; are you suggesting we all have a right to grab someone's phone and destroy it because they annoy us?
Avoid the theft/snatching charge.
Just punch the papparazi in the face and deal with the misdemeanor assault charge.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
OMG SO EVERYONE SHOULD GET IPADS INSTEAD OF PC's FOR WORK
that is what i see when i read your post....fact: ipad does not replace a pc. get this through your fanboy heads. its not a microsoft conspiracy either. I am a linux user.
-Noc
Yesterday I was listening to C-SPAN, and they were discussing a concept of crime under passion, giving an example of jealous husband who stumbles upon his wife having sex with another man, and that in some jurisdictions it's considered as a factor for sentence reduction.
I think snatching a camera when the owner is actively abusing "being in public" concept, could fall into that category.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
can i run visual studio or Siemens Step 7 on an ipad?
no? then bugger off while I write software for a million dollar industrial machine.
anyone can make a gimicky hardware toy, e.g OpenPandora, raspberry pi, apple ipad, but for real work cad (email and word dont count), I need a x86 Windows PC.
I think you seriously misunderstand the intent of the article. It is definitely not about Apple iThings. But since the general public doesn't have a slashdot car analogy to use, the article writer finds the general public's awareness of Apple iThings to be convenient to help put cost/value considerations into a frame and perspective they can easily identify and measure. And that's pretty important when getting a message across I should think.
The article also rightly calls out that iPad is less expensive than iPhone. The message of this article is that these devices are demonstrably exaggerated in price by carriers and/or manufacturers and that a consequence of such exaggeration is that theft of such devices moves into the range of felony under most juridictions. While they could have written the message that "mobile phones are overpriced" it helps to make the case by demonstrating some very concrete examples of real-world consequences of these exaggerated prices. After all, people have simply accepted the high price of these things and their rate of loss and theft.
See Firehose
--
"Math is hard! Killing Gooks is fun!" - Vietnam Barbie
Of course it can replace a PC. It just depends what your requirements are for work. Why I work, 80% of users can switch to tablets like the iPad, and save the company millions in maintenance and support fees.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
write 250,000 lines of C on a keyboard or touchscreen?
are you suggesting we all have a right to grab someone's phone and destroy it because they annoy us?
In general? No.
For paparazzi?
The same! - Of course!
The laws apply equally for everybody, even the paparazzi who're only doing their job.
Now, about the story - no real paparazzi would work with a smartphone so that part is bull. If someone was filming with such a toy, it's guaranteed it was a regular fan or similar. Real paps would be filming with a proper video camera, probably with a powerful light on top to really bother the subject. And now we come to the core issue: Both fans and paparazzi are allowed to film in public and taking someones property (the iPhone) and using it to break someone else property (the window) is most certainly not allowed. Now, Russell Brand not only destroyed private property, he also prevented someone from doing something completely legal, and he should be punished with a felony conviction as he's not the first that physically destroys cameras and similar when used legally by paparazzi. It is time to draw the line - you can run and hide, but you cannot physically attack. It is not only uncool and unprofessional, it's a felony.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Where you work is not where almost everyone else in the world works, buddy. You can't replace the nations banking, trading, medical, and _____ infrastructure with iDevices, or Android devices, or :cough.crapberries:.
I don't know what you do, it really doesn't matter, but you are wrong. iPads are mainly used as consumer toys, not IT solutions (which is maybe 1-5% at this point).
can i run visual studio or Siemens Step 7 on an ipad?
I don't think you could run either of those on a Windows phone ... or Windows tablet
If it's a Windows On ARM tablet, it'll be locked down as tight as a Windows phone. But if it's a Windows On Atom tablet, you can probably run Visual Studio just fine because Windows will see those as a PC with a pen.
or a Mac
Macs can run XCode. If you add a $200 copy of Windows, they can run Visual Studio.
or a Linux desktop
A Linux desktop can run plenty of Free IDEs. So can an Android tablet running AIDE. I guess this leaves iPad and Windows On ARM tablets as the only major tablets that can't be used for application development even when docked to a keyboard.
you CAN (easily) write a program every bit as fancy as anything you can produce on a PC, on a tablet or phone even.
Only if the tablet runs Android or some other operating system that allows unsigned or self-signed code. You can write a program on an iPad, but you can't test it because of how Apple's developer program works. You have to use something like Citrix or VNC to a PC to compile and run it, and if you're out of range of Wi-Fi and in the United States, a cellular data plan for doing that regularly can become expensive. I keep my netbook because I can code while taking the bus to and from work.
There's the firehose but it doesn't do anything for stuff that's gotten on the front page. I'd like to see a moderation and a bar that listed the percentages like
[---- 43% Informative ---] [--- 22% Insightful ----] [11 % Interesting --- ] [--- 12% Troll ---] [--- 9% Flamebait --- ] [--- 3% other ---] of coursed sized to proportions.
That way you could easily see if other people thought this was worth reading or not, not just whether it passed the somewhat arbitrary submission process.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why would I want my democracy's rules to be determined by the same people who've proven they don't care about the rules?
Because perhaps they care more about the rules than some other people. Let me guess: you would have approved of taking away someone's right to vote for having smuggled slaves out of the South into Canada in pre-1860s United States.
Unless you're rich enough to write your own undemocratic laws
The following does not apply to phone theft or vandalism, but would you approve of taking away someone's right to vote for having violated an undemocratic law that was written by someone who was rich enough?
Make that show up in the top of the RSS feed as well.
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.