

Why Is Apple's iPhone Prototype Entitled To More Justice? - brlewis
http://www.litigationandtrial.com/2010/04/articles/series/special-comment/why-is-apples-iphone-prototype-entitled-to-more-justice-than-jessica-gonzales-daughters/

======
Terretta
Asking "Why were two completely different crime department cases in two
completely different jurisdictions handled in two completely different ways?"
is just glomming onto current news in an attempt to raise the profile of some
other complaint.

The complaint (her TRO should have been enforced) is valid, but has nothing to
do with the handling of trade secrets investigation elsewhere in the country.

~~~
CoryMathews
The complaint is that if the law is the law then every case should be handled
the exact same. Regardless of who it is. A phone is a phone 3 daughters is 3
daughters. It should not matter whose phone or whose daughters.

They are simply showing how bad/corrupt/failed the current law system is.

~~~
pohl
Characterizing the incident as involving "a phone" is like saying that Ms.
Gonzales lost 3 mammals: true, but bereft of essential detail.

------
fierarul
People are ignoring the media aspect to all of this. You do not want such a
public case to go unpunished or ignored by the state.

If some random phone gets lost obviously you aren't going to spend too much
resources on this because there aren't enough available. I'm pretty sure not
all such individual cases are ignored, so it's not like only the corporations
"receive justice".

But, having such a public case about a presumably lost prototype, etc. be
ignored is a sign that the state considers this to be ok or of low importance.
You do not want that idea to spread into the mainstream. Justice isn't just
about busting dors, it's also a marketing (or propaganda) issue.

~~~
chc
If we use this logic, we must conclude that it is more acceptable in the
state's eyes (or at least the state wants everybody to think it is more
acceptable) to murder children than to take photos of a prototype phone. This
is an extremely disturbing case if your suggested reasoning is correct.

~~~
anigbrowl
No more than we must conclude two HN comments from different posters represent
yCombinator's corporate viewpoint.

~~~
chc
That's not similar, because we are not representatives of HN. Government
employees using their authority do represent the government.

~~~
anigbrowl
Which government? We have thousands of them in US, in case you hadn't noticed.
My point is that 'the state' is not a monolithic entity, and the comparison of
two different crimes in different jurisdictions in different decades doesn't
mean anything very much.

------
jvdh
The case has lots and lots of media attention.

And it may be just me, but the whole thing seems to be a pretty easy case: The
California law regarding lost items is pretty clear. If you think it's stolen,
you have to report it.

The website shows a story admitting to buying the prototype for $5000 and
showing lots of pictures holding it, disassembling, etc. They know who owned
it, and you're not going to pay $5000 for something that you're not completely
sure of.

~~~
sabat
But it was not stolen: the Apple employee who had been in possession of the
prototype, Gray Powell, admits that he got drunk and accidentally left the
phone at the bar. It was not stolen. It was lost.

~~~
evgen
When the finder failed to take adequate steps to return the phone and then
sold it to another party it was no longer lost, it was stolen.

~~~
MaxwellKennerly
Maybe so. But that doesn't answer the question as to why this stolen phone --
apart from the millions of other items stolen in California and reported to
the police -- deserved special treatment by law enforcement, and warranted the
use of unusual and aggressive measures to obtain information about it.

It's still just a single phone, a phone that's been returned to its owner.
Maybe Apple was damaged by the loss in a way the law recognizes. If so, then
they can file a civil lawsuit just like everyone else with a grievance against
someone else.

The part that's troubling here is how, if anyone else reading this post
reported to the police that an employee had lost a ready-for-market prototype
and that a blog had published pictures of it and then returned it, the police
would politely file the report at the bottom of the pile and then get back to
pursuing real crimes. Apple, however, gets an unannounced seizure of a
journalist's home and work computers.

Such preferential treatment demands an explanation.

~~~
app
Because stealing someone's iPhone off a restaurant table isn't a felony, it's
petty theft. You're trivializing what the new iPhone is. It represented
millions of dollars of R&D and contained proprietary information so is
therefor potentially protected under trade secret laws. There's no functional
difference between publicizing the physical phone or it's blueprints: you're
competition knows what you're up to (and can't sell yet) and your customers
are going to forgo buying your current product.

~~~
MaxwellKennerly
As I put in the post, "A trade-secret claim based on readily observable
material is a bust." IDX Systems Corp. v. Epic Systems Corp., 285 F. 3d 581,
584 (7th Cir. 2002).

The most Gawker revealed was (1) features readily observable on the outside
and (2) information printed on the components when the device was opened.
Obviously, none that would be considered a "trade secret" once the iPhone was
up for sale on the market.

Can a feature list be considered a trade secretly few months before the items
released? That's a tough one, particularly because Apple itself released this
iPhone into the wild, where it was found by a third party. It's not like
Gawker snuck into Apple's campus and found some research for products
contemplated way in the future, product so far off that Apple had not yet
filed a patent on the technology. (By way of background, the whole purpose of
trade secret law is to protect things that a person doesn't want to disclose
publicly by patenting. Almost by definition, a trade secret has to be
something that was patentable, and so far nothing on the prototype iPhone
looks like it was patentable.)

All of which brings us back to the central point: it's debatable if Apple even
suffered a legally-cognizable injury by virtue of someone bringing publicity
to a device Apple, through its employee, left out in the wild. In light of
that, and in light of the serious concerns about journalistic shield, REACT
should have shown caution. Instead, they took the most aggressive approach
they could have.

~~~
tienshiao
I agree that injury may not be big with consumers, but I can imagine scenarios
where the leak is damaging with business partners/suppliers/vendors.

For example, if Apple is negotiating pricing for current models and other
party was willing to pay more pre-leak because the did not think the next gen
would be as large of an upgrade.

------
CWuestefeld
The OP's counterexample, the Gonzales case, is just an example of "won't
someone think of the children?", and I have little patience for such
arguments, designed to evoke emotion rather than reason.

While you might not like it, Apple's marketing plans probably do have a larger
impact on our society than does OP's hypothetical lost phone. It's
unfortunate, but the realities of life force us to draw lines somewhere.

~~~
MaxwellKennerly
Maybe so. But if so, then REACT shouldn't have any trouble explaining why the
investigation of this single phone was so important. There are thousands of IT
businesses that have been cheated, defrauded, stolen from, and counterfeited,
and yet Apple's already-returned single phone gets preferential treatment.

Why? Your explanation might be perfectly valid, but it's not the explanation
REACT has given. They haven't explained anything at all.

~~~
CWuestefeld
My point wasn't that Apple is a business, and that other businesses should be
treated the same.

I was working on an idea of "size of the crime multiplied by the number of
people impacted" might define where the threshold lies. So murdering one
person is significant in that it affects one person _ultimately_ , and a good
chunk of other people in the second order. Losing one's own phone affects a
single person only, and not very significantly at that. Apple's losing their
prototype is analogous in the actual act, but the effect on Apple's marketing
multiplies it out big-time.

Other test cases for the thought experiment: bank robbery; simple assault;
rape; creating a public nuisance. I think the idea can be applied successfully
across all of these.

I don't know anything specific about the stolen iPhone case. I find the whole
"zOMG I saw a picture of the new iPhone!!!1!!" thing to be ridiculous. So I
can't address anyone's behavior in this instance.

~~~
MaxwellKennerly
That's, by and large, what most district attorneys and police departments do,
and that's what's so troubling about this action and the priority it was
given.

No one seriously believes that Gawker Media poses a continuing threat to
anyone, including Apple. There's also no question about the disposition of the
property; it's in Apple's hands. Further, the damage done is questionable. (I
don't mean "frivolous." By "questionable," I mean that there's a legitimate
dispute as to whether or not anyone suffered legally-recognized damages from
the leak, as compared to, say, someone running a counterfeit-iPhone
operation.)

In such a situation, most cops and DAs would put the investigation at the
bottom of their pile, tell the victim to file a civil lawsuit, and then focus
their resources at on-going criminal activity or crimes with substantial
damages to the public.

Here, however, REACT raced into action with a particularly aggressive
maneuver: a subpoena and unannounced seizure of a journalist's property.
That's among the most aggressive actions they could have taken, and the
decision-making behind it deserves an explanation.

~~~
slantyyz
Makes me want to mangle that Animal Farm line: "All lost phones are equal, but
some lost phones are more equal than others."

------
noonespecial
If I just come out and say it can we move along to more newsworthy items?

 _Because Apple has lots of money and political influence._

Justice is politics and politics is money. Its ugly when it shows up so
explicitly, but it should be no surprise.

~~~
barrkel
Outrage and attention are also political currency. In our outrage at
injustice, we draw attention to it and create incentives for something to be
done about it (and of course, not always to good effect). It's a counterpoint
- possibly the main counterpoint - to buying justice.

------
randrews
"He did it and got away with it" isn't a defense for breaking the law.

------
raganwald
Why is this opinion Hacker News? Does the system need to be hacked? Do people
think the system has been hacked? How is the presence of this story on HN
different than the presence of the same story on reddit?

~~~
Freebytes
Hacker News is not only about hacking. Hacker News is about delivering content
that is entertaining and useful to people that are programmers or people that
are planning or currently running a start-up.

This is actually completely relevant because anything involving this story
could involve a small business that finds itself in a similar situation.
Gizmodo could have been a small startup idea that only had a few viewers, for
example. It could happen to any of us that are starting a new business.
However, not everything must be relevant. Sometimes stories are simply
entertaining and break the monotony.

~~~
raganwald
> anything involving this story

Sorry, I don't believe that _anything_ involving the story is relevant to HN,
nor do I believe that anything entertaining is HN. The acid test is "Anything
that would gratify our intellectual curiosity." Some issues connected to this
story do, some do not.

Remember that almost everyone here reads multiple sources of information: We
read reddit, we read stackoverflow, we are on twitter. Therefore, there is no
need for HN to contain every story that might be entertaining or even
interesting.

For example, anecdotes about using dating sites are of great prurient interest
to hackers, but not Hacker News. Stories about what makes some profiles on
dating sites attract more responses than others: Hacker News.

So besides entertainment value, what specifically about _this_ post should
gratify my intellectual curiosity? What can I learn from this post to write
software? What does it teach me about running a start-up?

~~~
anigbrowl
Intellectual property rights are a perennial issue for hackers, I would say.
There are iPhone-related stories on the front page almost every day because
that is the commercial platform of choice for many HN members.

 _What does it teach me about running a start-up?_

I'd say quite a lot; core IP can be very hard to keep secure, you should be
suspicious of people offering to sell you IP without clear proof of ownership,
you can unwittingly incur legal responsibilities at the same time as material
benefits, and economic considerations often trump ethical ones.

------
bradfordw
Because in this day and age we value our gadgets more than our freedom. If
<big business name> isn't happy, then no one is happy.

