What Do You Get for Buying an Unreleased iPhone? A Police Raid and Busted Door
At least that’s what Gizmodo editor Jason Chen received. {Gizmodo}
"A friend of a friend went to a bar, and all I got was a lousy police raid"
Gizmodo received heavy media coverage for publishing photos and specifications of an unreleased iPhone prototype, but some – including Apple, have questioned the legality of how the company came into possession of the top-secret device. According to Gizmodo accounts, the phone was left in a bar by Gray Powell, an Apple employee out celebrating his 27th birthday. {Gizmodo}
Powell left the iPhone prototype at the bar where he’d been drinking, and someone who’d been sitting next to him eventually ended up with the phone. Despite a few phone calls and emails to Apple, no one returned the inquiries about how to return the device. A few weeks later, with no word from Apple, the person who found it sold it to Gizmodo for $5000.
In California, buying stolen property is a crime, but that’s where things get a bit fuzzy. If the person at the bar who found Powell’s phone had indeed made efforts to return it to Apple, did he actually steal it? Further, if his account is accurate, could it be considered stolen property if the owner never responded to attempts to return it?
Apparently Apple, who is notorious for secretive testing and release practices that make the military look chatty, thinks so.
So last Friday, San Mateo police armed with a search warrant broke down Chen’s door while he was at dinner with his wife and seized business cards, 3 MacBooks, 2 digital cameras, 1 Dell desktop, an IBM Thinkpad, 2 external hard drives, a Motorola phone, an iPhone, an iPad and a server.
Our first thought is that Chen would be a really good friend to have if you ever needed to use a computer, but a close second is that in addition to seeming pretty heavy handed, it doesn’t seem legal unless there’s some indication that the person who found the phone in the first place didn’t make an effort to return it to Apple. Additionally, there are questions surrounding the legality of seizing the items from a journalist, since the investigation seems to focus on revealing more information on the source who sold the lost iPhone.
We’re guessing this means Gizmodo is officially off of the Apple press preview list.
