Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

Apple instigates Police Raid over lost/stolen iPhone 4G

<< < (19/26) > >>

wraith808:
That is incorrect, and stated quite succinctly in the post:
California law, like the law of every other state, provides that if you find lost property and know who the owner is, yet fail to make reasonable efforts to return it, you’re guilty of theft.

In this case, not only did Mr. Hogan reportedly not make reasonable efforts to return the lost property to Apple, but he allegedly engaged what is commonly called a “fence” to contact various technology blogs offering to sell the phone to the highest bidder.

--- End quote ---

It's already been established that he knew and sold the engineer's name.  Why, given that he had the engineer's name and place of employment could he not return the device directly.  Especially given that gizmodo was able to get in touch with him after the fact (using the information that had been sold to them by the finder)?

Gwen7:
hi again!

last i heard there is now some real question as to how much effort actually got made to return the phone. the other problem is the $5000 bounty gizmodo paid to get it. if Brian Hogan had just given the phone to gizmodo it might have been viewed differently. but it's the speed with which this amount of money was offered and paid that brings the whole incident into question as a possible theft.  alway a silly thing to do.

 :)    

mwb1100:
Professor Green mentions several reasons for the apparent sympathy for Hogan and Chen:

  - the "finders keepers" confusion
  - protection for "investigative journalists"
  - a David/Goliath sympathy
  - the idea that "information wants to be free"
 
While I understand that California's protection for investigative journalism might not apply to this case (for various legal reasons), I still do have leaning toward protecting journalists.  I know that many people might not consider Gizmodo bloggers to be jouralists, but I think I would.

But even accepting that the protections don't apply here, I still feel (note the word 'feel' rather than 'think') that the police actions were more than necessary. That feeling can probably be ascribed most accurately to something like envy (closely related to the David/Goliath feelings Green mentions).  I can't help but think that if something valuable to me were found/stolen and I told the police who I thought had the item that I'd get not much more than a cop knocking on that person's door as an investigation.  I guess that I'm just jealous that Apple gets a full blown bash-the-door-in raid.

wraith808:
I definitely agree that the police (and Apple if they were behind it) went a bit far with that.  But I see all sides of the disagreement to be at fault- not just Apple.  The only person that I see that is getting the short end of the stick truly is the engineer if what I've read is true- that Apple does have their engineers go out into the field and use the phone as their primary phone.  Because if that's the case, then this was eventually going to happen, and he just seemed to draw the short stick in this deal.

Stoic Joker:
The only person that I see that is getting the short end of the stick truly is the engineer if what I've read is true- that Apple does have their engineers go out into the field and use the phone as their primary phone. Because if that's the case, then this was eventually going to happen, and he just seemed to draw the short stick in this deal.-wraith808 (May 04, 2010, 04:51 PM)
--- End quote ---

Now on that note I will totally agree with you (which should probably be marked on a calendar somewhere... ;) )

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page