He appears to be the victim of an illegal search & seizure.

Do you really want the cops to be able to bust in your front door if you accept & write about something someone else found and gave to you??

Even if Chen was not given the phone by someone who found it (i.e the 3rd party stole it) should a warrant have issued to bust in and search his home??

Kinda standard when you're accused of receiving stolen property. He KNEW he was buying property that didn't belong to the seller. Is this a tricky concept? Really?

He is a willing accomplice to the sale of stolen property. Do you think he paid 5 large for it without knowing what it was?

I have no sympathy for him.

I was involved in a business transaction where the other party requested a concession far in excess of what was legally allowed.

The likelihood of getting tagged for it was pretty insignificant.

On advice of my attorney I killed the deal as I would have been aiding in the commission of a fraudulent act. Considering the fraudulent portion of the deal was 6 figures I'm sure it would have carried felony penalties.

He either got some pretty bad legal advice or chose to ignore it and take the risk.

"when you're accused"
"willing accomplice"

- you guys are missing something - it is called probable cause & is enshrined in the Constitution

there is a tiny tiny chance that the cops somehow had probable cause but I'd REALLY like to see the evidence

his computer may have the evidence your looking for..... what if the guy next to him slipped him a "ghb" beer...... remember Gizmodo offered 100,000$$ for 1 hour with an Ipad before it was launched, how many $$$ have they made off of this, the prototype had a plastic case over it, that looked pretty hard to get off

WTF???

He posted a video of himself dissecting property that he bought from someone he KNEW was not the owner.

No probable cause? Really? REALLY???

yeh - REALLY

he lives in the US - we have a Constitution here

where the F do you live???

Appearing in a video in possession of illegally obtained property is "probable cause" that a crime has been committed.

I'd ask you to think carefully before you respond but I don't want you to hurt yourself.

it is amazing how many legal and factual errors you can compress into a single sentence

actually the REAT team has not opened the computers up because Gizmodo is saying it is protected by the "Journalist' confidentiality clause, so before anything can be looked at do they fall under that... I say no, but I was just trying to get differing views on if bloggers are in fact journalist and protected http://sanjose.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2010/04/26/daily36.html

So, you think that the hardware is what makes an iPhone? :rolleyes:


Anyway, here's the list of observations from gizmo guys...

• Front-facing video chat camera
• Improved regular back-camera (the lens is quite noticeably larger than the iPhone 3GS)
• Camera flash
• Micro-SIM instead of standard SIM (like the iPad)
• Improved display. It's unclear if it's the 960x640 display thrown around before—it certainly looks like it, with the "Connect to iTunes" screen displaying much higher resolution than on a 3GS.
• What looks to be a secondary mic for noise cancellation, at the top, next to the headphone jack
• Split buttons for volume
• Power, mute, and volume buttons are all metallic


Again, they didn't divulge any killer features about the product. Just that the iPhone is FINALLY getting some features that so many other phones have had for some time now.

Oh wait . .this JUST in... the new iPhone has a special, customizable, voice activated vibe-mode --to control, fanboys just yell; yes Apple YES!!! . .. yes YES YES!!! :eek:

island: "My HTC TouchPro 2 " yes yes yes...... HAHAHAHAHAHA LMAO what a 'piece'

Buying known stolen property- how does that protect a journalist?

That may/may not be the case, but I bet that is how they acquired the subpoena!

Even a journalist is not protected if they did something illegal to acquire the source/story/whatever!

I agree

holey non-sequitur batman

in a higher class of bars...

I expressed your concerns to my next door neighbor tonight. She's the District Attorney. She laughed. A lot.

I think that clearly bloggers are journalists.

They are the 21st century newspapers.

What do you expect?

District attorneys think everyone is guilty.

Yup, and then he admitted as such that he went on to pick it apart and document it once he determined it was in fact a real Apple product, before he returned it.

What, if any, is the difference between a journalist and a blogger?

A journalist (ideally) has a professional responsibility to verify information, check sources, print ‘facts’ (as best as they can be defined), portray the story from different viewpoints, and at least have a pretence of being ‘objective’ (although objectivity in news is not really a burden in Britain, where biases are obvious and held up for everyone to see). To this end, what journalists write has gone through some sort of peer or editorial review process.

Bloggers, by contrast, have no such professional responsibility or obligation. They can, within certain legal limits, print what they want without any obligation to verify sources or separate fact from opinion. The only obligation they have (if even that), is to maintain their audience. I also think that blogging revolves around a certain intimacy between the writer and audience in a way that is different from mass journalism. http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=738 so does the law protect the journalist because he has to verify information and the blogger doesn't? I, too, believe that we are going into the 21 century of blogging. a blogging website just got bought out BGR for a lot of money http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2010/04/26/were-taking-bgr-to-the-next-level-mmc-acquires-bgr/ How can Gizmodo think that protecting their resources applies here( journalist or blogger) wonder what's on those computers, I think they are toast

Okay, who here has Apple stock?

The crime potentially committed is theft, as plainly stated in the penal code quoted above. The evidence is the blogger's own posts and photos. The suspects are the blogger and the guy from whom he received the stolen item. Pretty straightforward probable cause for a warrant, I think.

Where do the sympathies lie? Who cares. Tech is Silicon Valley's economic engine. Crimes that threaten that engine are going to be taken seriously there. Remember that there are thousands of companies employing thousands of people working on thousands of secret products there, any of which could be "found" and sold - if not to bloggers then to competitors, domestic or foreign. Makes sense to me that law enforcement would want to at least investigate this.

I've made no secret that I have AAPL stock, and if you did you would have made a good profit, I don't like saying" wish I had bought that stock! man what was I thinking, I could have bought that for X dollars! damn Apple is on a roll, 12 cylinders pumping..... when that ends, if it does, it will look like Microsoft so I know what to look for, anything wrong with that? I think the word for this is "industrial espionage "only these guys are pretty goofy... if you think the "competitors" didn't look at Gizmodo's website to see the new iphone before launch, well then your wrong, probably had magnifying glasses out

Gizmodo's chief legal counsel sent a letter to local police, noting that Chen is a journalist and thus, under both California and Federal law, a warrant cannot be issued to search his home and seize property that could have been used for the purposes of a news story.

There are a number of court decisions in the past that provide Gizmodo and Chen with the precedent they need to show that online journalists are, in fact, covered under the same protections as traditional journalists.

If it was stolen then why did Apple not take the phone back when it was offered - for THREE weeks??

There are also numerous concerns re the "RAT" and its funding.

That feature doesn't work yet in iPhone OS version 4 beta.
From the serial numbers I saw on the back that wouldn't work - they were all "x" along with the FCC ID.

wow.

Did Apple ever report a stolen prototype?

spinning this as a theft is a bit ridiculous.

to you it is

Now that Apple has Publicly added the information of what the device is, it's easy to say that the Gizmo guys should have known. But, at the Time, it could have been so many other things. It could have been a Chinese prank. It could have been a custom phone for some rich guy. It could have been just a design study. ...

Apple is the one which outted what the phone actually is.

+1

Funny, I once had a prototype lost.. One of my clients wanted to do his own focus groups. He took it with, all the way to the airport where he left it on the train. :(

A long story short, a few months later some guy calls about how one of the features (found only on the new design) had broken. "Send it back for a replacement." was the response. ...not "thief! ...we will sue you!"

obviously he didn't get 5-10 large for it.....

Exactly. Gizmodo bought property from someone they KNEW was not the legal owner. That is a crime. Are they journalists? Of course. Is their action protected? Of course not.

It would not matter if the reporter worked for Time magazine or the Washington post, he bought something that he KNEW was not owned by the seller. How the seller got it does not matter, the buyer knew the seller did legally own it. It is and should be, a felony.

The similarities between your situation and the iphone are striking.

Point was, spinning this as a theft is a bit ridiculous. Apple could have handled this MUCH better/smarter.

Are you claim that this was a theft?

If you found what appeared to be an iPhone proto/oddity would you show it to any of your friends? Or, would you immediately assume that this was something that needed shielding from curious eyes? ....make sure that no other eyes saw the piece, while wading thru Apple Indians in an effort to get the word to the Apple chiefs as soon as possible?

I have a feeling that if the same thing happened to Microsoft, that the people clamoring 'theft ..felony..." would be silent.

I'd show it to friends then hand it over to the bar manager. EDIT: I'd even take some pictures of it. Which is not a crime.

No longer my problem and no cops kicking my door in. What the bar manager does is not my concern and not my problem.

Now if the bar manager was shady I might go find a cop and hand it over.

See how simple that is?

I'd laugh my ass off but it would not change the nature or my opinion of what happened.

The law in California is clear. You may not purchase property from someone you know is not the lawful owner. Pretty fükking simple.

The law also requires a "good faith" effort to return found property to the rightful owner. But that is an entirely separate issue.