Gizmodo faces visit from cops over 'found' iPhone A tech blog that paid five grand to the finder of a prototype iPhone is under police investigation, as it seems buying found property is against the law. Gizmodo paid $5,000 to the chap who found a next-generation iPhone in a bar, and the blog made merry with the device before returning it to Apple - after forcing Cupertino to …
Surely not....if the finder has tried to return it and the owner (or the owning company's representative) has disclaimed ownership then surely title simply moves across at that point. It is not like the guy who found it tired to pull a fast one, he did the decent thing and was rebuffed. The lawyers may make merry (and stretch the bill) but no matter how much 'an indignant corporate body' may try to stir things up there cannot be a case to answer here.
They also claimed it was a cheap Chinese knock-off (or so the story goes). If this is true, then the finder probably has a reasonable argument that, at this point, he figured it was worth less than the $400 or $100 that people report California law requires you to return the goods. Of course, this view changes rather a lot when he sells it for $5k!
"..if the found item is valued over $400 .."
Ah,... so what is the retail price of this item?
The person who 'sold' it on to Gizmodo was not selling the phone itself, He was selling an opportunity to an author. After that author had finished a session of deep admiration of the item, he returned it to its original owner. There was never any intention to deprive the rightful owner of the item and many efforts were made contact the owner and make arrangements to return it.
It was the owner's responsibility to go to trouble of making proper enquiries and then traveling to pick it up from the finder, not the other way around.
The seller said he discovered it was an Apple device after opening it up. He says he called Apple a few times, didn't get anywhere so sold it - it's been confirmed that he didn't say anything to the bar (where the guy who lost it had been phoning frantically) or report it to the police. He also has a pretty good idea of the name of who lost it and where he worked after looking at the Facebook app on the phone.
On all counts there is no defence at law until ther is an offence.
Never defend yourself to the bill. Let them tell you what you have done and what they are going to do about it.
The go to your lawyer and tell them everything.
Then, and only then and only that if you are satisfied with what the lawyer comes up with...
Wait for the bill to do what they said they were going to do.
Then when they change there minds be prepared to confront their next ploy.
Once they start looking, they don't stop until you stop talking to them.
Ergo nil logo schtumo.
If you find something, you must make reasonable attempts to identify the owner. If you cannot do this, you must then turn the thing over to the police if its value is > $100.
Failure to do the second part is theft. Subsequently selling the item (which, because you asked Gizmodo for $5000) you know is worth more than $100 is fencing.
The owner had at that point been identified because Gizmodo published his identity (his phone contained his Facebook profile).
There are any number of ways they could have returned to the phone to its owner, most of which involve a jiffy bag, the phone in it, and "FAO Apple Legal" written on it.
Personally I'd have rocked up to 1 Infinite Loop and asked for, in exchange for the phone, nothing more than a tour of the campus and a coffee with The Steve.
Gizmodo and their source are in for a vigorous bumming.
It would seem that after reasonable attempts at returning are being rebuffed, the finder is the rightful owner. Who can sell it at an outrageous price, and also the buyer doesn't break any laws.
However, I don't see reasonable attempts have been made: the facebook app took him straight to the engineer's homepage, so he could have left a message there and I'm sure a meetup could be arranged and even some small payment. Given that facebook info, I don't see that some spotty call centre drone can be expected to know about prototypes, and/or how to reach the wanted engineer; it's not in the script.
Hardly - from what I understand, the bloke who found the phone tried giving it to one of the Genius Bar blokes, who understandably went "you wot?" and told him they hadn't a clue what he was talking about, which they almost certainly didn't. If I found some nifty new prototype-tech thing on a train, 1st-line support would not be my port of call.
Umm, they made NO attempt to contact the OWNER.
They didn't even leave a message in the place they found it so that the owner could get in touch.
They found the guys Facebook page - did they post there with a message saying that they'd found the phone?
They contacted his employers, despite knowing exactly who he was.
If I found your phone and called the main desk of your company, would they know what the hell I was talking about?
If I found your phone and called the main desk of your company, would they know what the hell I was talking about?
probably not, but they would find out.
And something tells me that if they had lost a prototype jesus phone then everyone at apple would have known about it. I recall when i was a lad a prototype ford escort getting nicked one time in swansea EVERYONE knew about it. INSTANTLY. and on the lookout for a weird looking escort (reward see!)
The article says he was told it was a knock off and to go away... maybe he is taking the piss a little, as subsequent events reveal he clearly had some idea what it's worth - or at least found out.
but my balanced opinion is..... it apple, so fuck em
mine's the one with the pre construction magical and revolutionary crap in the pocket
"That person apparently tried to return the handset to Apple, but the support desk staff (who don't have access to the goings on in the R&D department) told him it was just Chinese knock-off and not to bother them with it."
Call me cynical if you like, but I wonder if he/she (the 'finder' - oh the irony) has any proof they did that and what Apple's response was. If they haven't and it ends up being Apple's word against theirs well... I wouldn't advise booking any holidays soon. I do know that Gizmondo wouldn't have paid 5 grand for a 'chinese knockoff', which suggests they at least knew that wasn't true.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, the SOP round these parts if you find some lost property in your local is to hand it in to the bar, where they keep it in case the owner comes back looking for it. The fact the finder didn't do that puts him/her on very sticky ground, as does the fact they didn't try to contact the engineer bloke himself, given they had various ways to ID him from the phone. Going to an Apple shop and talking to someone who logically would have no clue either way looks very much like an attempt to observe 'the letter of the law', which I doubt the court will consider sufficient.
"As has been mentioned elsewhere, the SOP round these parts if you find some lost property in your local is to hand it in to the bar, where they keep it in case the owner comes back looking for it. The fact the finder didn't do that puts him/her on very sticky ground..."
If the finder actually worked in the bar he was following the SOP for barstaff - found something, no-one claimed it, kept it.
This is how my brother normally gets a new phone so be wary of keypad locks that prevent him going through the phonebook and calling numbers stored as mum/dad/home etc when he's cleaning up the bar and finds your phone.
"Of course, our man tried to return it, but Apple didn't want to know."
The thief (yeah, I said it) did in no way "try to return it". What he engaged in was merely the flimsiest of attempts to cover his arse. Given that the thief knew the name of the owner, had access to their Facebook page and knew that the owner would most likely return to the places he had been in order to try and locate the item, there were many more effective and honest things that could have been done to "try and return it".
Instead, the thief sold something which they knew was not theirs, and the bottom-feeders at Jizzmodo bought something which they knew had been obtained dishonestly (would you pay $5000 for something you suspected might be a cheap fake? Get the fuck out of here, they knew exactly what they were buying).
This is not, under any circumstances "freedom of the press". This is borderline industrial espionage, and I look forward to that smug tossrag Jason Chen having his back door kicked in by Bubba and his mates at one of California's finest hotels for the light-fingered and stupid. Just as a nice payback for their appalling treatment of someone else's career as collateral damage in their grubby pursuit of page views.
"Freedom of the press is guaranteed in the US, and Gizmodo counts as "press" in this context, so trade secrets can be published - but this is a physical thing, an actual item for which money was paid, and that changes the situation considerably."
It has been reported that Gizmondo could be in trouble under the Californian law, The Uniform Secrets Act:
"(a) “Improper means” includes theft, bribery, misrepresentation, breach or inducement of a breach of a duty to maintain secrecy, or espionage through electronic or other means. Reverse engineering or independent derivation alone shall not be considered improper means.
(b) “Misappropriation” means:(1) Acquisition of a secret of another by a person who knows or has reason to know that the secret was acquired by improper means; or (2) Disclosure or use of a secret of another without express or implied consent by a person who:(A) Used improper means to acquire knowledge of the secret; or (B) At the time of disclosure or use, knew or had reason to know that his or her knowledge of the secret was: (i) Derived from or through a person who had utilized improper means to acquire it; (ii) Acquired under circumstances giving rise to a duty to maintain its secrecy or limit its use; or (iii) Derived from or through a person who owed a duty to the person seeking relief to maintain its secrecy or limit its use; or (C) Before a material change of his or her position, knew or had reason to know that it was a secret and that knowledge of it had been acquired by accident or mistake.
(d) “Trade secret” means information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process, that:(1) Derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to the public or to other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use; and (2) Is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy."
http://thetradesecretsblog.wordpress.com/trade-secrets-law/california-civil-code-§§-3426-et-seq-the-uniform-trade-secrets-act/
The Act also says:
"§ 3426.6. An action for misappropriation must be brought within three years after the misappropriation is discovered or by the exercise of reasonable diligence should have been discovered. For the purposes of this section, a continuing misappropriation constitutes a single claim."
In which case Apple's lawyers may have something to do....
I don't know about US law but over this side of the pond the law is very clear on what you must do with found property. You must either return it to it's owner or hand it over to plod. If you retain it you are committing the offence of "stealing by finding". Saying you had made an effort to return it to it's owner would not be a defence. If your efforts failed you should have handed it over to plod. Knowingly buying found propterty would be dealing in stolen goods. The only defense you could try would be that you didn't know the goods were stolen, but that would still leave you out of pocket and minus the phone.
Furthermore the finder could be charged with both stealing by finding and dealing in stolen goods, although the way things work over here he would probably be charged only with the more serious of the two offences.
I doubt that US law is so much different to ours that this isn't a clear cut case.
That's not quite right.
If the item has been abandonded by the owner/operator then you are free to 'salvage' it. You are NOT legally obliged to hand ANYTHING over to the police, you are, however, obliged to INFORM the police of what you have found and they will then decided whether or not to take it off you.
In this guys defence Apple saying "not our product, not our problem" is, to most resonable minds, abandonment. That works for the UK but US law is a very different beast in which the guy with the most money/best lawyers will always win.
Loving "stealing by finding" though :D
A finder is obliged to notify the Police - but not to surrender it. I once found a very valuable ring & gave it to my mother to hand in. She took it to the Cop Shop but refused to surrender it, after the counter staff said they intended to 'transfer it across London' (but refused to say where to). Outcome - she retained custody of the ring & 6 weeks later could keep it.
In all honesty as far as I can see no-one really comes out of this smelling of roses - the bloke wot lost it, the bloke wot found it, Gizmodo for buying it off him or Apple for either a) letting a key piece of strategic hardware out of a controlled environment or b) engaging in a pretty tawdry piece of publicity
For me the real bad guys in this are the scum-suckers who thought it would be OK to publish the name of the silly sod that left it in the bar in the first place - whether he did that deliberately or not, they don't know that so they have to assume it was a mistake - it's a crap way to play with someone's career.
RIght that's enough! You, you and you, sit down! You, give my that phone! If you can't look after it, I'll have it! Come and see me in detention at the end of the day when you can write a 500 word essay about why it's important to stop being a tell-tale and a fibber!
"Apple for either a) letting a key piece of strategic hardware out of a controlled environment or b) engaging in a pretty tawdry piece of publicity".
I'd got with A ( presumably they didn't think they'd need to tell their staff to avoid necking several jars of memory inhibitor while in possession of one of the test units) but how exactly is B at all true? All Apple have done is send Giz a letter asking for their property back after Giz made a big song and dance about having it. A private communication which Giz then put on their front page.
They didn't squeal about it. They didn't publicly call for Giz to be dragged off to the nick, they just sent a letter asking if they could have back something which it appears there is a good argument was stolen from them.
Just what exactly have Apple done at any point in this that can at all be described as tawdry, especially compared to Giz, who paid five grand for something they almost certainly knew they shouldn't be buying and pretty much kicked an innocent bloke's career into touch for the crime of losing his phone?
F'ing norah, talk about double standards.
Blimey, I never thought I'd defend Apple, but I can't see that they've done anything wrong in this case. OK, the engineer in question may have been ill advised to neck enough beer to forget the phone, but I'm not casting any stones there - I have a missing camera for the same reason. The two sinning parties are the finder and Gizmondo, both seem to have acted amorally if not illegally. Perhaps our engineer might like to move to Redmond, I hear there's a company there crying out for people who can develop decent phones...
@ Jonathan White and Sandman - you're right, my intention with point B was to appease the conspiracy theorists who reckon the whole thing is a publicity stunt on the part of Apple. If that were true then I think it's tawdry getting into bed with chequebook journos
For the record I'm more inclined to believe that A is more likely in that it was a mistake by the guy that left it in the bar, but if that is the case I think Apple should have better control of their kit than to let people take it out of the office like that, especially when it's kind of important to their future strategy
I completely agree with you.
"scum-suckers who thought it would be OK to publish the name of the silly sod that left it in the bar in the first place".
WITHOUT at any point contacting him via the details they had and saying "we've found your phone".
Basically, they had a phone that they knew wasn't theirs. They even knew whose it was but they made no attempt to return it. All they did was phone the front desk at Apple HQ, who understandably said they knew nothing about it... exactly as the theives knew would happen...
Erm...they did contact the guy that lost the phone. He past the reporters details on to Apple legal, hence the request to have the phone back.
Oh and for all the muppets saying that Giz screwed trhe guy's career up, I suggest checking out Giz/Wired's story about the engineer who showed Apple co-founder the Woz an Ipad before he should of... the guy got fired, the guy who lost the phone...still at apple.
Yeah sure they did... _after_ buying it for $5000 and publishing half a dozen different exclusive news stories on it. And the reason Apple Legal was on to them was because they saw the news of their new iPhone prototype all over the internet. Stop kidding yourself.
So they contacted the engineer that they knew owned the phone, after posting 4 stories and 2 videos about it and after sharing a detailed teardown of the hardware for all to see on the internet, all the while raking in the ad dollars. Wow, I guess I was wrong, they really did the right thing and not just the bare minimum they thought they'd need to confirm it as a real device and simultaneously try and cover their backs on legal terms.
If I find a phone, how do know who owns it?
Can I call the phone-ownership bureau and ask? No.
So in this case the finder did exactly the right thing: called Apple and said, "I'm not sure who's phone this is, but I'm reasonably sure that -you- have and interest in it." To which Apple did not respond.
He then reasoned that if he made his find public, that Apple would have no choice but to commit to their ownership and take back the phone. And by putting it into the hands of Gizmodo, that's exactly what happened.
Apple pretended that they did not own it and that paved the way for everyone else to go along with the pretence.
The owner of the phone turned out to be Apple, that's why they asked for it back.
All the finder and Gizmodo did was force Apple to admit to ownership. And my guess is that rather than doing the right thing and admitting to their mistakes, Apple has decided to waste taxpayer money by getting the authorities involved, rather than suffer the embarrassment of their actions having come to light.
Grow up, Peter Pan. You and the other lost boys are the only ones who care about your phones and your pads and the rest of your self-hyped crap. The rest of us are trying to deal with -real- problems and we'd appreciate it if you didn't gum up the press and the legal system with the fallout of your tender egos being crushed.
>If I find a phone, how do I know who owns it?
If the owners details aren't in there somewhere obvious, like a facebook app, email, sms, home contact, etc. Then the same way ambulence drivers use your phone to identify you if you're in an accident, look at the last few numbers in the log, and ring one of them.
LoL.
"All the finder and Gizmodo did was force Apple to admit to ownership"
Surely you mean, "All they did was each make a nice profit from something which should really have been handed in to the bizzies."
If the guy that sold it to Gizmodo is kicking himself about anything right now, it's probably that he didn't ask for a lot more fencing moolah from Gizmodo to fund a retirement in Mexico. You can be sure Gizmodo have made enough cash from all the publicity and page views.
Well when it has Home phone numbers, user's facebook status and text message right there within literally one click, it's stupid to assume there needs to be some sort of Central Bureau of anything. And if you weren't just being a facetious idiot then you can surely see he could hand it in with the manager of the business that it was found in, rather than stealing it.
"Well when it has Home phone numbers, user's facebook status and text message right there within literally one click, it's stupid to assume there needs to be some sort of Central Bureau of anything. And if you weren't just being a facetious idiot then you can surely see he could hand it in with the manager of the business that it was found in, rather than stealing it."
He's being an idiot. It's that simple. And, yes, it was theft.
"If I find a phone, how do know who owns it?
Can I call the phone-ownership bureau and ask? No."
No, you moron, you look in the Address Book or the Contacts (or whatever it's called on that phone) and look up 'home'. On both of my cell phones my home address, main email, and landline phone are there.
In addition, you could look up 'Work'. On both my phones my office address, work email, and office phone complete with extension are there.
Both my home and my office phone are on the speed dial area of both my cell phones.
In addition, the cell phone number of the _other_ phone is in the Address Book, and on the speed dial.
Finally, if you don't want to go to that much trouble, you could do what _I_ would do, and what I _have_ done twice in the past: hand the lost device over to someone who works at the place I found it. (Once for a restaurant, once for a movie theatre. At the theatre, while I was turning over a found phone the owner came up and was able to identify it. He knew the number.)
What I _wouldn't_ do is sell the damn thing. It's not mine to sell.
But you know that.
If I left my phone in a bar and it contained all of my facebook information, I'd damn well expect the guy to either leave the phone in with the bar manager or to send me/my friends a message over facebook saying that he has my phone. Expecting him to phone up Nokia in Finland to return it would be entirely idiotic. Stupider yet would be him expecting the support drones to even know who I am.
Bottom line is, the guy could have handed it in or contacted the rightful owner if he wanted to. He knew fine rightly that the support jockeys have no idea who owns any given iPhone and claims that he phoned them only to cover his back.
The fact that he knew the full name and contact details of the owner and then sold it to Jizzmodo for 5 large is just disgusting and is clearly theft. Jizzmodo have screenshots of the facebook page of the owner so they too are culpable for buying stolen goods. I hope they all get sent up the river on this shameful charade.
Gizmodo confessed to the crime in its article. It was a voluntary confession - for all the world to see.
It stole Apple's prototype, took it to New York, dismantled it, and wrote about it to the world.
The prototype is worth millions of dollars.
Guess what? It is Grand Theft.
Someone is going to prison for several years.
Gizmodo could not be absolutely sure who the owner was, based solely on the word of the person selling the device. Therefore, Gizmodo would have to assume the owner was unknown. HOWEVER, the person who sold the device to Gizmodo had seen the original owner (and thus was able to tell Gizmodo), so HE therefore is the one liable based on the law of theft.
WHAT a bunch of plonkers.
I find the phone in a bar, I know where Apple lives and could take it to them. Instead, I contact some ethically warped trade web site and offer it to them.
If someone on the other side of the country wants to pay me $5k for something that we both know doesn't belong to me and I ship it to the other party, then that's a bit like fencing stolen goods.
If I, the ethically challenged gadget-freak group, then brag about the act on my website, then I might be classifiable as a felon – and the worst kind of wanker.
Would probably do them some good to get dinged for it.
I have found out how to use the "not" tag in the Gizmodo URL to cut out all apple, iphone, ipad and iwhateverapps stories. Of course, there's not much left, but there is more of a chance that I'll spot the one or two things on this site that *do* interest me.
I guess I won't be seeing much of this story there
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