The guy bought something that was obviously stolen. This was willful behavior. He spent $5,000. Come on! This article was written as if he saw it sitting on a table in a bar and took pictures of it.
If a journalist has to pay to get a revealing interview with somebody, are they "stealing" something? Apple wasn't deprived here, didn't Chen give the phone back?
Say apple was the chinese government, and the iPhone was a disgruntled official who was involved in the "let's hack google" thing...the new your times pays the disgruntled official for an inside scoop.
China is evil and Apple is omg awesome, so clearly this is better. Apple is just so nice to everyone, they didn't deserve to have pictures of their newest telephone published... because now everyone knows the Evo 4G is cooler, and Apple will go out of business as a result.
Does my logic make sense? Let's raid someone's house just to be sure. Nobody would call that over-REACT-ing.
"Obviously stolen"? Where is this reported as being true?
And even so, would it have made a difference to you if it was on Wikileaks instead? Be careful what you're choosing to condemn in your support of Apple.
I'd like a clear explenation of this as well. So far I've seen this claim repeated again and again by Apple fanboys, but everything I read seem to indicate that it was lost (and then passed around).
Would anyone have cared at all or defended this if this was a lost OpenMoko or something equally irellevant?
I would have cared if it was my phone. I don't understand how you can classify this is anything BUT a stolen phone. If I leave my phone at a bar and some guy runs off with it, it's stolen.
I once left my wallet on top of a gas pump while filling up my car. I drove away, realized my mistake, and was back within a couple of minutes. My wallet was predictably gone. Is that 'finders keepers'? Nope, it's a stolen wallet.
How was it stolen? It was lost. The finder tried to return it and when he got turned down with no success, he turned around and sold it. The person who did the wrong doing was the finder and not Chen.
A good-faith attempt was not made, IMO. A manager of an Apple store certainly would have been a good person to return it to. A note to Steve Jobs would have gotten their attention, and it's not like no one has his email address.
You're right that the finder did the most wrong thing here, by selling the lost phone (at which point, IMO but IANAL, the phone was stolen because the finder no longer had any intention of making any further effort to return the lost phone to the rightful owner). However, Gizmodo/Gawker/Chen are not blameless as buying stolen goods is itself a crime.
The recent Wired story about Brad Hogan, the guy who found the phone, implies that Hogan did not actually make any of the attempts to find the phone that Gizmodo claimed. Whatever the justification of the police raid on Chen's house and all the other elements of this story, it seems clear that Hogan never had any intention of making a good faith attempt to return the phone to its rightful owner.
