It's probably just me, but the phrase "nonfamily safe" doesn't seem to parse all that well. Personally, I read that as "safe for non-families".
This is called a bracketing paradox, and it's commonplace in natural languages. The classic textbook example is nuclear physicist, which doesn't mean "a physicist who's nuclear," but rather "an expert on nuclear physics."
The problem with that is that in American sitcoms, verbal irony is accompanied by non-verbal cues like facial expression, tone of voice, or, ugh, laugh tracks. Take away the cues, and deliver the sarcasm in a deadpan manner, and tons of people in the USA are completely unable to catch it, neurotypical or not.
"Heck the only reason that Germany really lost on the Russian front was because Hitler was the one person on the planet that treated the Russians worse than Stalin did!"
Not a military reason for losing a war is it? True, you are not going to engage with the local population but that hardly matters if you are strategically and militarily superior.
While the GP is clearly too simplistic, you can't seriously think that support or opposition from the occupied population isn't an element of strategic position and military strength. The Germans did seriously piss off the inhabitants of the Soviet territories they invaded, and it very seriously came back to bite them later when they lost the upper hand--instead of grateful Ukranians and Russians fielding volunteers to help them contain the Soviet advances, they had those folks joining the Red Army to get revenge by invading Germany.
Hitler lost in Russia due to a number of factors of which the most significant would be:
a) massively long communication lines that implied long lead times for supplies
b) production in Germany suffering due to a lack of raw materials
c) the harsh russian winter causing artillery to freeze up and man to die of cold
d) improvements in Russian production and deployment of crack Siberian trained troops (especially around Stalingrad)
e) German reliance on inferior Hungarian and other Axis allied troops to protect their battle flanks
The items on that list ain't bad, but of course the list can be questioned. Your last three items seem to be assuming that the Stalingrad battle had to happen, when it was probably a bad idea from the German side.
Other things worth mentioning: (f) Hitler was too late to put the German economy on war footing; (g) Hitler's best generals didn't agree with his strategy of conquering the Caucasus, which led to their sacking and replacement with inferior generals; (h) Hitler's repeatedly capricious and over-ambitious goal changes in mid-campaign (which includes the whole decision to fight Stalingrad as a supposedly decisive battle); (i) Soviet intelligence correctly discovering that Japan wouldn't invade Russia; (j) Hitler's pause of the drive to Moscow in 1941; (k) German soldiers, fed endless propaganda about how Slavs were a dumb, cowardly and inferior race, may have underestimated their Russian opponents.
And all of those reasons I just listed are biased, because they tend not to give any credit to the Soviets, who may have started out the war very weak but got a lot better in a hurry--while the Germans only got weaker. In particular, towards the later days of the war, the Soviets were completely running circles around the Germans operationally speaking, repeatedly getting the Germans to guess the Soviet plans wrong. The best German units had a tactical advantage till close to the end of the war, but the Soviets dealt with that by making sure that the best, strongest German forces were chronically at the wrong place at the wrong time.
This move looks to be intended to deflect some unwanted attention from the court - the judge got some bad information that he based the search warrants on and now he wants the truth to be known.
No, most likely the judge simply released them because the information in them is no longer time-sensitive. The burden is on the prosecution to convince the judge that the documents should still be sealed; the default is to allow third parties to see them. There was a legitimate concern when the warrant was issued that Chen might be tipped off about the search and destroy evidence--like Hogan and his friend actually did.
the room-mate was the only individual to come out of this with integrity. Good on her, is what I say.
From the cop's affidavit, I'd say it's mixed. Point in her favor: she thought it was wrong to sell the phone because she was worried it might ruin Gray Powell's career. Points against her: (a) it's not clear that she understood clearly that keeping somebody else's phone for three weeks in order to sell it is theft; (b) she only acted to stop it when she feared that she might be blamed for the situation.
Yeah, here's our problem. If Apple is allowed to lie, then so is the publication.
Being allowed to lie doesn't mean that they're allowed to keep the phone. You're making this needlessly complex. The phone is not theirs, they know who the owner is, and the owner is asking them for it, ergo they must give it back. Who lies or says the truth in what forum is irrelevant to that. The law is "you must give stuff to its owner if you know who it is," not "you must give stuff to its owner if the owner makes a notarized statement that the item is theirs and publishes it in 20 newspapers."
When did we lose the battle so badly that we don't even think corporations have an obligation to be truthful?
Please state what law forbids a corporation from lying in general. Again, there are specific limitations on commercial speech (which apply to both individuals and corporations), but other than that, the First Amendment means a corporation can say anything that no law specifically forbids them from saying, and "thou shalt never lie" is not one of those laws.
Both people and corporations have an obligation to be truthful in their public lives.
No, there is such a thing as privacy in the case of people, and trade secrets in the case of corporations. A closeted gay man can lie and say he's straight when somebody asks him directly. A corporation can lie and say that a reported prototype of a next-generation phone is a hoax.
We don't accept "secret" evidence in this country. If you make a complaint to the police, and they get a warrant based on that complaint, then both the complaint and warrant should be a matter of public record, as the judge just affirmed. Apple, legally, isn't allowed to demand the return of "stolen" property without publicly stating the phone is theirs.
Apple is perfectly well allowed to privately demand from Gizmodo that they return their phone to them; that's just a private-party communication between Apple and Gizmodo, and you know, Apple has the right to tell Gizmodo stuff, make requests of them, and even to word their requests very strongly and call them "demands." Gizmodo in general don't have to acquiesce to random demands from Apple, but in this particular situation, if they know that the phone was Apple's, they better return it without making a fuss, because, well, it's Apple's property, not Gizmodo's.
Apple is of course obliged to tell the truth to the police and to the courts if they get involved. But nothing in the previous paragraph involves police complaints or court proceedings in any fashion, just communications between private parties.
Again, you're making this overly complex by introducing all sorts of detail that's just not relevant. If you have something that you know belongs to somebody else, you must give it back to them promptly. Whatever lies, crimes, torts or abuse of the legal system that the owner may perpetrate is irrelevant to whether you should return it.
Yeah, except that when you're dealing with the press, there's no such thing as "off-the-record" unless the reporter agrees it is.
Yes, Gizmodo can say that Apple told them that the phone is theirs. Apple can deny it.
Under your plan "publicly deny, privately demand," Apple is free to take the phone and then sue the publication for libel.
Yes. Your point being? This is a risk any publication takes when it publishes anything that casts its subject in bad light. News organizations are supposed to take care that they have a reasonable reason to believe what they report. In this case, well, Gizmodo had plenty of evidence that the phone was Apple's.
Since truth is the ultimate defense against libel, the publication is well within their rights to document all of their transactions with Apple, including the return of the phone.
True, but Apple is still allowed to lie to the public about it. They should get whacked hard by a judge if they try to sue the news organization, but that's about it.
Cameras on.
"Here's the phone. Would you like us to give it to you?"
"Yes, give it here."
"Is this your property?"
"No, that's not ours."
"OK. Fair enough. We'll keep our shiny new phone."
First, they're not allowed to keep a phone that is not theirs unless they follow a very specific procedure that involves returning it to the police. Second, they know that the phone belongs to Apple; their actions in other contexts demonstrate this. This is not a situation where they're skeptical that Apple is the owner of the phone and are trying to confirm that they are. They can't base their refusal to return the phone to Apple on a statement that they know is false. What's relevant here is Gizmodo's knowledge, not Apple's public statements.
A good analogy (though not an exact one) might be this: you know a guy in your neighborhood called Joe Smith. You know that he is mentally ill, you know he owns a gold watch with his name inscribed on it, and you know how the watch looks. One day, you see Joe drop his gold watch; you pick it up from the floor, but when you try to give it back, he denies that he owns the watch, because he's acting crazy. In this case, you can't claim the watch for yourself on the basis of his denial, because you know that the watch is his, and therefore, you know that the denial is false.
The hypothetical case where Apple publicly denies ownership and privately acknowledges it is very similar. Apple's false public statements don't trump Gizmodo's knowledge of the phone's ownership.
IIRC, they did figure out who the guy was, talked to him, and gave it back. Kind of undermines the whole theft thing, doesn't it.
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:
If somebody loses something, you find it, and you are able to return it, you should do so promptly.
You shouldn't use something that's not yours unless you have permission from the owner.
However, there's a few exceptions: it's ok to make minimal use of somebody else's lost item if it's necessary to return it to them. If the item is perishable, it's ok to sell it and then give the owner the proceeds (the law in California actually states this).
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.
Quit being lazy and read the filed court documents yourself, fool. You've got a brain, fucking use it or STFU.
"Sewell [Senior VP at Apple] told me [the detective] that after Gizmodo.com released its story regarding the iPhone prototype on or about 4/19/2010, Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) contacted the editor of Gizmodo.com, Brian Lam. Jobs requested that Lam return the phone to Apple. Lam responded via the email address blam@gizmodo.com that he would return the iPhone on the condition that Apple provided him with a letter stating the iPhone belonged to Apple. [...] Sewell said that after the letter confirming the ownership of the phone was sent to Lam, Lam responded via email that the phone was in the possession of Jason Chen at [address omitted]."
You're arguing for the right to lie while initiating a legal proceeding, which is problematic at best.
Dude, stop talking about law. Apple have not initiated any legal proceeding. They talked privately with Gizmodo, and filed a complaint to the police. They must not lie to the cops, but they're allowed to tell Gizmodo privately that the phone is their and deny it in a public forum.
If corporations have a right to lie in a public forum, then NOTHING they say should be trusted and pretty much every other office should be filled with a regulator to prove every nickel and track every bit of industrial waste.
There are many laws regulating commercial speech that make it illegal for a company (or a person) to lie in many situations, for example, in advertising and in statements to investors. However, there's no blanket law that says that corporations always have to say the truth in every context, and when it comes to protecting trade secrets, yes, corporations certainly have the right to lie to keep their trade secrets, as long as they don't run afoul of any other law.
In this case, again, yes, Apple can tell Gizmodo privately that the phone is theirs, yet deny publicly that any such conversation took place, or that they lost the phone. That public denial does nothing in this case, because Gizmodo knew that the phone was Apple's, as shown by their actions and statements elsewhere. They can't justify keeping the phone on the basis of that public denial, because they know that the denial is false.
So If I found it, (and took it like the guy did), I would be stealing - but really only from this Powell guy as I would have no idea the phone wasn't a regular old iPhone in which Apple would have no interest at all. I'd have just turned it in at the bar though as I wouldn't want an iPhone anyway.
No, if you found it and returned it to the bar, you wouldn't be stealing. If you honestly find somebody else's property, keep your use of it to a reasonable minimum necessary to identify the owner, honestly try to give it back in a reasonable amount of time, and failing that turn it in to the police as lost property, you've committed no crime at all. Really, the key words here are honest and reasonable; your actions have to be consistent with a desire to respect other people's property, which means returning stuff to its owner promptly, and not using things you don't have permission to use.
The law only starts asking whether it's theft when there's evidence that you're not being honest and reasonable in those regards. So, if on the contrary, after you find the phone, you keep it for a long time without trying to locate the owner or turn it in to the cops, use it for your own benefit or sell it to somebody, well, then you probably have committed theft.
There are very few exceptions. For example, if the lost item is a perishable good and is in danger of spoiling, you may sell it and then give the money to the owner.
You can't have it both ways. You can't publicly deny it's yours while simultaneously demanding the return of the phone.
I agree with the previous two responses, but I just have to add one thing: you actually can have it both ways. If you're in possession of the phone, and if you know it's Apple's, you have an obligation to either return it to Apple or turn it in to the police. This obligation isn't conditional on anything else; it doesn't disappear if Apple publicly denies the phone is theirs. Apple are perfectly within their rights to publicly deny that the phone is theirs, and privately tell you that the phone is theirs and demand that you return it. In that situation, you're still required to either return it to them or turn it in to the police.
Seriously, they said it was invaluable? so if the SEC came down on your ass you couldn't get a number? Please.
I don't see what's wrong with an Apple employee, during an informal conversation with a police detective, saying that a prototype is "invaluable." The detective got him to agree that the phone was worth at least $8,500, which is the whole degree of precision necessary in that context.
In a different context, e.g. a lawsuit or, well, statements to the SEC, then yeah, you'd use some sort of model to produce a dollar-amount estimate of how valuable that phone is to the company. This is not that context.
Before you let your roommates know you've possibly committed a felony make sure they won't turn you in.
Actually, one interesting thing I noted from the affidavit is that, at least as far as the detective understood, the roommate didn't seem to realize that Hogan may have been committing a felony. The affidavit says that she tried to convince him not to sell the phone because she was concerned it might ruin Gray Powell's career. If this is true, she seems to have been as ignorant about theft laws as all those Slashdot posters who insist that selling a lost phone you found isn't theft.
A worker left it laying around and from the stories I read, there was an attempt to return it but Apple was too stupid to take 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.
The "tried to return it" story looks even worse now in the light of the contents of the affidavit. Hogan's roommate evidently had no difficulty contacting Apple about the phone.
The guy who stole/found the phone doesn't look too good from this report, but remember when Gizmodo was talking to him they didn't have Apple's side, or a full police report. They believed the guy tried to return it to Apple. If he didn't, that's on him, not Gizmodo.
Let's assume that the finder had in fact made extensive efforts to return the phone to Apple, and Gizmodo knew it for certain. That doesn't change the fact that buying stuff from a guy who doesn't own it is either theft or receipt of stolen goods. And they did it with the goal of appropriating it for their own use.
If it was stolen, but not Apple's, they still have no claim to it.
But Gizmodo actions show that they had no doubt at all that the phone was Apple's. They offered to pay more than $10,000 for it, and actually paid some of that money. They wrote a series of news stories explaining how their disassembly of the phone demonstrated that it was an Apple prototype. They published a story detailing all the information they knew about the Apple employee who lost the phone.
Before you can call it stolen property you need to confirm that it is actually something that was owned by the person claiming it was stolen.
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.
All Apple had to do was state this was their property, which is entirely reasonable. Until they do, they can't claim it's stolen property.
Just because the owner doesn't claim an item doesn't mean it's not stolen. If I take your car without you knowing, it's still stealing. If I then abandon your car, and some guy finds it and go to your house to give it back to you, and your drunken uncle says the car isn't yours, that doesn't mean the guy gets to keep it, either.
I can easily think of other possibilities that don't require an Evil Conspiracy(TM):
They've expanded their program to have employees test the prototypes in the real world, either by giving the prototypes to a larger number of employees, or by making it easier for them to take it out of the office (suggested by the fact that they had an iPhone cover custom-made to disguise these phones!). Correspondingly the chance of losing a phone went up.
They're just being randomly unlucky this time around, and lost more phones than normal.
They're losing about as many phones as they did in the past, but in a different case of random unluck, in previous occasions the finders actually returned them without leaking them. People simply assume that no Apple tester ever lost a prototype like this before, but frankly, I wouldn't be surprised at all if this has happened at least once with a prototype of an earlier model.
FACT 6: if the Bob is a big enough entity then the FSF may decided to sue Bob
The FSF does not have standing to sue unless they own Alice's work that Bob is distributing. Alice would have to assign copyright of her code to the FSF for them to be able to do so.
1. Alice starts a GPL project.
2. Bob hires Alice to write an extension to the GPL project.
3. During her employ (or before, it doesn't matter) Alice uses some GPL libraries written by Claire.
4. Alice leaves Bob's employ.
FACT 1: Bob owns all the changes Alice made while in his employ.
FACT 2: Alice had no right to distribute changes owned by Bob.
FACT 3: Bob is not obligated to distribute the changes.
FACT 4: As the GPL only relates to distribution, not use, Bob is free to use the software.
FACT 5: If Bob later distributes the changes without placing those changes under the GPL, both Alice and Claire can sue him.
This strikes me as mostly correct, except that it's not clear to me that (1) is quite accurate in the submitter's case. We don't have the details here, but my money would be that the submitter's situation is more like the following: when Alice started using her original code under the employ of Bob, she didn't tell Bob in any way that she was licensing that code to him under GPL--and in fact, I would bet that there was no conversation about licensing at all. So Bob has some sort of implicit, non-GPL license to Alice's original code, that allows him to at least use the code and modify it for his own uses.
The legal resolution of this situation would come down to either getting Alice and Bob to explicitly agree after the fact on what that license is, or failing that, having a judge decide it. My guess, however (and I am very much NAL), is that Bob can't claim that he has an implicit license to distribute Alice's code, since the contract between them (I guess) doesn't give Alice any special consideration that could be construed as compensation for granting such a license. In simpler terms, if Bob wants to claim strong rights over Alice's original code, and he can't prove that she explicitly granted him those rights, he better be able to prove that at least he somehow paid or compensated him for that code beyond what he paid her to extend it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is called a bracketing paradox, and it's commonplace in natural languages. The classic textbook example is nuclear physicist, which doesn't mean "a physicist who's nuclear," but rather "an expert on nuclear physics."
The problem with that is that in American sitcoms, verbal irony is accompanied by non-verbal cues like facial expression, tone of voice, or, ugh, laugh tracks. Take away the cues, and deliver the sarcasm in a deadpan manner, and tons of people in the USA are completely unable to catch it, neurotypical or not.
While the GP is clearly too simplistic, you can't seriously think that support or opposition from the occupied population isn't an element of strategic position and military strength. The Germans did seriously piss off the inhabitants of the Soviet territories they invaded, and it very seriously came back to bite them later when they lost the upper hand--instead of grateful Ukranians and Russians fielding volunteers to help them contain the Soviet advances, they had those folks joining the Red Army to get revenge by invading Germany.
The items on that list ain't bad, but of course the list can be questioned. Your last three items seem to be assuming that the Stalingrad battle had to happen, when it was probably a bad idea from the German side.
Other things worth mentioning: (f) Hitler was too late to put the German economy on war footing; (g) Hitler's best generals didn't agree with his strategy of conquering the Caucasus, which led to their sacking and replacement with inferior generals; (h) Hitler's repeatedly capricious and over-ambitious goal changes in mid-campaign (which includes the whole decision to fight Stalingrad as a supposedly decisive battle); (i) Soviet intelligence correctly discovering that Japan wouldn't invade Russia; (j) Hitler's pause of the drive to Moscow in 1941; (k) German soldiers, fed endless propaganda about how Slavs were a dumb, cowardly and inferior race, may have underestimated their Russian opponents.
And all of those reasons I just listed are biased, because they tend not to give any credit to the Soviets, who may have started out the war very weak but got a lot better in a hurry--while the Germans only got weaker. In particular, towards the later days of the war, the Soviets were completely running circles around the Germans operationally speaking, repeatedly getting the Germans to guess the Soviet plans wrong. The best German units had a tactical advantage till close to the end of the war, but the Soviets dealt with that by making sure that the best, strongest German forces were chronically at the wrong place at the wrong time.
No, most likely the judge simply released them because the information in them is no longer time-sensitive. The burden is on the prosecution to convince the judge that the documents should still be sealed; the default is to allow third parties to see them. There was a legitimate concern when the warrant was issued that Chen might be tipped off about the search and destroy evidence--like Hogan and his friend actually did.
From the cop's affidavit, I'd say it's mixed. Point in her favor: she thought it was wrong to sell the phone because she was worried it might ruin Gray Powell's career. Points against her: (a) it's not clear that she understood clearly that keeping somebody else's phone for three weeks in order to sell it is theft; (b) she only acted to stop it when she feared that she might be blamed for the situation.
Being allowed to lie doesn't mean that they're allowed to keep the phone. You're making this needlessly complex. The phone is not theirs, they know who the owner is, and the owner is asking them for it, ergo they must give it back. Who lies or says the truth in what forum is irrelevant to that. The law is "you must give stuff to its owner if you know who it is," not "you must give stuff to its owner if the owner makes a notarized statement that the item is theirs and publishes it in 20 newspapers."
Please state what law forbids a corporation from lying in general. Again, there are specific limitations on commercial speech (which apply to both individuals and corporations), but other than that, the First Amendment means a corporation can say anything that no law specifically forbids them from saying, and "thou shalt never lie" is not one of those laws.
No, there is such a thing as privacy in the case of people, and trade secrets in the case of corporations. A closeted gay man can lie and say he's straight when somebody asks him directly. A corporation can lie and say that a reported prototype of a next-generation phone is a hoax.
Apple is perfectly well allowed to privately demand from Gizmodo that they return their phone to them; that's just a private-party communication between Apple and Gizmodo, and you know, Apple has the right to tell Gizmodo stuff, make requests of them, and even to word their requests very strongly and call them "demands." Gizmodo in general don't have to acquiesce to random demands from Apple, but in this particular situation, if they know that the phone was Apple's, they better return it without making a fuss, because, well, it's Apple's property, not Gizmodo's.
Apple is of course obliged to tell the truth to the police and to the courts if they get involved. But nothing in the previous paragraph involves police complaints or court proceedings in any fashion, just communications between private parties.
Again, you're making this overly complex by introducing all sorts of detail that's just not relevant. If you have something that you know belongs to somebody else, you must give it back to them promptly. Whatever lies, crimes, torts or abuse of the legal system that the owner may perpetrate is irrelevant to whether you should return it.
Yes, Gizmodo can say that Apple told them that the phone is theirs. Apple can deny it.
Yes. Your point being? This is a risk any publication takes when it publishes anything that casts its subject in bad light. News organizations are supposed to take care that they have a reasonable reason to believe what they report. In this case, well, Gizmodo had plenty of evidence that the phone was Apple's.
True, but Apple is still allowed to lie to the public about it. They should get whacked hard by a judge if they try to sue the news organization, but that's about it.
First, they're not allowed to keep a phone that is not theirs unless they follow a very specific procedure that involves returning it to the police. Second, they know that the phone belongs to Apple; their actions in other contexts demonstrate this. This is not a situation where they're skeptical that Apple is the owner of the phone and are trying to confirm that they are. They can't base their refusal to return the phone to Apple on a statement that they know is false. What's relevant here is Gizmodo's knowledge, not Apple's public statements.
A good analogy (though not an exact one) might be this: you know a guy in your neighborhood called Joe Smith. You know that he is mentally ill, you know he owns a gold watch with his name inscribed on it, and you know how the watch looks. One day, you see Joe drop his gold watch; you pick it up from the floor, but when you try to give it back, he denies that he owns the watch, because he's acting crazy. In this case, you can't claim the watch for yourself on the basis of his denial, because you know that the watch is his, and therefore, you know that the denial is false.
The hypothetical case where Apple publicly denies ownership and privately acknowledges it is very similar. Apple's false public statements don't trump Gizmodo's knowledge of the phone's ownership.
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.
"Sewell [Senior VP at Apple] told me [the detective] that after Gizmodo.com released its story regarding the iPhone prototype on or about 4/19/2010, Steve Jobs (Apple CEO) contacted the editor of Gizmodo.com, Brian Lam. Jobs requested that Lam return the phone to Apple. Lam responded via the email address blam@gizmodo.com that he would return the iPhone on the condition that Apple provided him with a letter stating the iPhone belonged to Apple. [...] Sewell said that after the letter confirming the ownership of the phone was sent to Lam, Lam responded via email that the phone was in the possession of Jason Chen at [address omitted]."
My emphasis, which I fear might not be enough.
Dude, stop talking about law. Apple have not initiated any legal proceeding. They talked privately with Gizmodo, and filed a complaint to the police. They must not lie to the cops, but they're allowed to tell Gizmodo privately that the phone is their and deny it in a public forum.
There are many laws regulating commercial speech that make it illegal for a company (or a person) to lie in many situations, for example, in advertising and in statements to investors. However, there's no blanket law that says that corporations always have to say the truth in every context, and when it comes to protecting trade secrets, yes, corporations certainly have the right to lie to keep their trade secrets, as long as they don't run afoul of any other law.
In this case, again, yes, Apple can tell Gizmodo privately that the phone is theirs, yet deny publicly that any such conversation took place, or that they lost the phone. That public denial does nothing in this case, because Gizmodo knew that the phone was Apple's, as shown by their actions and statements elsewhere. They can't justify keeping the phone on the basis of that public denial, because they know that the denial is false.
No, if you found it and returned it to the bar, you wouldn't be stealing. If you honestly find somebody else's property, keep your use of it to a reasonable minimum necessary to identify the owner, honestly try to give it back in a reasonable amount of time, and failing that turn it in to the police as lost property, you've committed no crime at all. Really, the key words here are honest and reasonable; your actions have to be consistent with a desire to respect other people's property, which means returning stuff to its owner promptly, and not using things you don't have permission to use.
The law only starts asking whether it's theft when there's evidence that you're not being honest and reasonable in those regards. So, if on the contrary, after you find the phone, you keep it for a long time without trying to locate the owner or turn it in to the cops, use it for your own benefit or sell it to somebody, well, then you probably have committed theft.
There are very few exceptions. For example, if the lost item is a perishable good and is in danger of spoiling, you may sell it and then give the money to the owner.
I agree with the previous two responses, but I just have to add one thing: you actually can have it both ways. If you're in possession of the phone, and if you know it's Apple's, you have an obligation to either return it to Apple or turn it in to the police. This obligation isn't conditional on anything else; it doesn't disappear if Apple publicly denies the phone is theirs. Apple are perfectly within their rights to publicly deny that the phone is theirs, and privately tell you that the phone is theirs and demand that you return it. In that situation, you're still required to either return it to them or turn it in to the police.
I don't see what's wrong with an Apple employee, during an informal conversation with a police detective, saying that a prototype is "invaluable." The detective got him to agree that the phone was worth at least $8,500, which is the whole degree of precision necessary in that context.
In a different context, e.g. a lawsuit or, well, statements to the SEC, then yeah, you'd use some sort of model to produce a dollar-amount estimate of how valuable that phone is to the company. This is not that context.
Actually, one interesting thing I noted from the affidavit is that, at least as far as the detective understood, the roommate didn't seem to realize that Hogan may have been committing a felony. The affidavit says that she tried to convince him not to sell the phone because she was concerned it might ruin Gray Powell's career. If this is true, she seems to have been as ignorant about theft laws as all those Slashdot posters who insist that selling a lost phone you found isn't theft.
Let's assume that the finder had in fact made extensive efforts to return the phone to Apple, and Gizmodo knew it for certain. That doesn't change the fact that buying stuff from a guy who doesn't own it is either theft or receipt of stolen goods. And they did it with the goal of appropriating it for their own use.
But Gizmodo actions show that they had no doubt at all that the phone was Apple's. They offered to pay more than $10,000 for it, and actually paid some of that money. They wrote a series of news stories explaining how their disassembly of the phone demonstrated that it was an Apple prototype. They published a story detailing all the information they knew about the Apple employee who lost the phone.
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.
Just because the owner doesn't claim an item doesn't mean it's not stolen. If I take your car without you knowing, it's still stealing. If I then abandon your car, and some guy finds it and go to your house to give it back to you, and your drunken uncle says the car isn't yours, that doesn't mean the guy gets to keep it, either.
Except that they knew it was Apple's already, so the claim is simply bullshit.
I can easily think of other possibilities that don't require an Evil Conspiracy(TM):
It's actually irrelevant whether the guy that ended up with the phone found it honestly or not. His subsequent actions amount to theft.
Yes, it is legal. It says so right on the site's FAQ page.
The FSF does not have standing to sue unless they own Alice's work that Bob is distributing. Alice would have to assign copyright of her code to the FSF for them to be able to do so.
This strikes me as mostly correct, except that it's not clear to me that (1) is quite accurate in the submitter's case. We don't have the details here, but my money would be that the submitter's situation is more like the following: when Alice started using her original code under the employ of Bob, she didn't tell Bob in any way that she was licensing that code to him under GPL--and in fact, I would bet that there was no conversation about licensing at all. So Bob has some sort of implicit, non-GPL license to Alice's original code, that allows him to at least use the code and modify it for his own uses.
The legal resolution of this situation would come down to either getting Alice and Bob to explicitly agree after the fact on what that license is, or failing that, having a judge decide it. My guess, however (and I am very much NAL), is that Bob can't claim that he has an implicit license to distribute Alice's code, since the contract between them (I guess) doesn't give Alice any special consideration that could be construed as compensation for granting such a license. In simpler terms, if Bob wants to claim strong rights over Alice's original code, and he can't prove that she explicitly granted him those rights, he better be able to prove that at least he somehow paid or compensated him for that code beyond what he paid her to extend it.