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Honestly, I don't think the police or Apple care too much about the guy who found the phone. Yeah, he failed to comply with the law and and instead pocketed $5000. Maybe he's sweating in terror right now, wondering how much of an attorney's time he can buy with whatever he didn't spend; maybe he was clever and used a throwaway email address, a false name, and didn't show any ID to the Gizmodo staffer who gave him the money (cash? check? who knows?).

He is a petty criminal...but probably just an opportunist rather than having malicious intent. Paradoxically, it might have been safer for him to set up a blog called ifound-iphone.com and post pictures in a 'LOL it came from the future' fashion: naivete might be a mitigating factor.

But Gizmodo/Gawker has no such excuse. Their whole business is the exchange of reader attention for advertising. They are leaders in their market sector, with a deep understanding of the tech industry and its role in the economy. and they have already been warned by Apple's outside counsel that offering money for hot information is an incitement to criminality.

With all this knowledge and experience, when they got hold of a prototype - which they themselves say was well disguised with a 'very ingenious solution to protect future designs from lookeyloos', they chose to disassemble it and publish detailed information about its manufacture, with a completely reckless disregard for anyone's business interests but their own.

If I were an attorney on Apple's or the DA's staff, my approach would be to forget about the seller, because his testimony isn't even necessary to bring suit against or prosecute the Gizmodo/Gawker folks. In fact, if they do offer to give him up, and I bet they will, I'd say I didn't care.

(I'm not an attorney BTW! It might be professionally unethical to behave like that if the information was being offered.)




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