DailyFinance has an excellent article questioning the legality of Gizmodo’s acquisition of the next-gen iPhone prototype we heard so much about in the last week. The article raises questions as to wether Gizmodo’s possession of the device could incur civil if not criminal charges.
At heart is the question of whether the person who found the phone made “reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him,” as required by the California penal code.
DailyFinance goes on the point out that Gizmodo claims that the finder of the device asked about the device in the bar–seeing if the owner was still in the bar. The following day the finder also reportedly called several Apple support numbers but got nowhere.
There still seems to be a legal problem though:
What he never did, however, was notify anyone who worked at the bar, according to its owner, Volcker Staudt. That would have been the simplest way to get the phone back to the Apple employee who lost it, who “called constantly trying to retrieve it” in the days afterward, recalls Volcker. “The guy was pretty hectic about it.”
Nor did the finder report it to the Redwood City Police Department, says Sgt. Dan Mulholland.
So, it boils down to this: Did Gizmodo know if the person they were buying the device from had legal ownership of the device according to local law. Nick Denton, the head of Gawker Media–which owns Gizmodo–claims that they purchesed the device, but intended to return the device to Apple if they could verify it as a genuine Apple prototype.
It’s still unclear if Apple is going to pursue this further. They did request the device be returned, but there have been no other legal rumblings from Apple at this time.
So, it appears, at least under local or state law, that the person who found did not do enough to find the owner, which means Gizmodo bought stolen goods.
Get the popcorn, this is going to be a show.
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