They purchased known stolen property and used it to make some money before returning it. That's illegal and I don't see why they shouldn't be held responsible for what they did.
No. They purchased a phone "found at a bar". They acted in good faith that it had been lost. When asked to return the property, they did. There are exceptions for good faith actions in most "receiving stolen goods" type laws for a reason.
Read up on the lost property laws in California. The person who found it had an obligation to return it to the proprietor of the bar, who had an obligation to return it to the original owner for the next three years. Under the law, it was stolen.
Let me get this straight. If someone offers to sell you a cellphone (any cellphone) that they "found", you're going to buy it and keep it until the owner of said property tracks you down and asks for it? And this is "good faith"?
I call bullshit.
Especially since it was an iPhone prototype. You know it's Apple's property, you know they want it, and you know how to contact them. You also know that the person selling it to you knows the same thing -- they're selling it, after all. You are participating in breaking the law by buying it from them unless you're buying it with the intent of immediately returning it and reporting the offender to the police.
Really, that's the end of the story. The rest is bullshit.
More to the point: the folks at Gizmodo, being reporters on this very industry, were uniquely positioned to know exactly what the phone was. The five thousand dollars that exchanged hands drives home that point. They'll have a very difficult time mounting an ignorance-based defense here.
Buying an item that is not blatantly restricted (e.g. is not marijuana), on claims of the seller that it is legit, is good faith. Further, upon request from the original owner, it was returned. This is also good faith... aka "oops my bad". What they did in between is called "I do stuff to my property", and perfectly ok.
Note: this was my thinking before I found out CA has weird laws about this (see other replies in this thread).
There's no way to legitimately acquire a 4G iPhone prototype. So if the seller said "I've got a 4G iPhone here" then it sounds like he was basically admitting at least theft of trade secrets.
do you have a better idea on how to prove that a non-working iphone in a case that looks like an iphone 3gs but has some differences is in fact the next iphone?
Several sites have posted excerpts of California's penal code detailing how not returning lost property is equivalent to theft.
Between that and the half-assed attempts of the "finder" to try to return the phone, according to California state law, the phone is almost certainly considered stolen.
