Well sure. Once the consequences of your wrongful actions come home to roost of course you're going to come to regret those actions.
I think this guy is probably being a bit too harshly treated by the media / public, but I would hope this whole thing will give others pause when they weigh the morality of filching lost property even when there's the opportunity to make a few quick kilobucks and be part of a, to you perhaps, exciting scoop in technology journalism.
The lawyer is going to have to wrest that $5k from the mouths of those orphans in Kenya...you know, the orphans the alleged thief spends his spare time raising money for.
And I don't think the lawyer will have a problem with this. I've never seen a lawyer with moral obligations :-). You want to chat with this lawyer, that's a $250 fee for the first 5 minutes.
He should have taken a day or two to return the phone (not weeks), and he shouldn't have let Gizmodo disassemble it. But otherwise, to be honest, I don't see what he did wrong.
he practically stole the phone and then sold it. he didn't even try to leave it at the bar, to ask the day later the bar people if somebody asked for it (the guy who was missing it returned more times!) he didn't try to return it directly to Apple (And maybe receiving the current generation phone as the present) he obviously wanted to profit by selling it to somebody else, as he asked more media companies!
The case here is a "reasonable attempt" to return the phone. It is very possible that asking the other patrons if the phone belonged to them was reasonable enough.
Didn't the Gizmodo article say that he saw the owner's name and Facebook profile while playing around with the phone (before it was bricked remotely)? If so, why didn't he contact him directly?
I think this guy is probably being a bit too harshly treated by the media / public, but I would hope this whole thing will give others pause when they weigh the morality of filching lost property even when there's the opportunity to make a few quick kilobucks and be part of a, to you perhaps, exciting scoop in technology journalism.