“According to the owners of the bar where [the prototype iPhone] had been found, he [the finder] never told anyone there that he’d found the phone. If he had, he’d have learned that the Apple engineer who’d lost it had come back to the bar on several occasions to see if it had been found yet.”
I guess this finder guy skipped kindergarten or Sunday school. I remember learning way back then that you don’t just keep things you find. You try to find the owner. Or you give it to someone who will try to find the owner.
You don’t sell it to the press.
This is not a first amendment thing as some of the media has been trying to claim.
Update 12:20 PM MDT: Threat Level | Wired.com is a better source.
The finder apparently tried several times to call Apple, and was repeatedly turned away. Not saying he should have sold the phone (he shouldn’t have), but he didn’t try to sell it right away.
Not according to the finder’s own attorney, Avelino:
“A friend of Hogan’s then offered to call Apple Care on Hogan’s behalf, according to Hogan’s lawyer. That apparently was the extent of Hogan’s efforts to return the phone.”
Wired.com, which also notes:
“It’s generally considered theft under California law if one ‘finds lost property under circumstances that give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner’ and yet appropriates the property for his own use ‘without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him.’
Not that I think Hogan did the right thing, but if I found Apple’s top-secret new iPhone, I wouldn’t have known that it was anything other than some guy’s phone.
I would have either tried to find an emergency contact number stored in the phone or given it to the bartender. Not trying right then and there to find the owner, regardless of what the phone actually turned out to be, was wrong.
But it was the guy that lost the phone that screwed up the worst and Apple has blown this far out of proportion. Perhaps they need to do a better job of safeguarding their technology. Like not having their engineers taking top-secret iPhones to bars.
Let me understand. If I leave my keys in my car and someone comes along and takes the car (with the registration in it) and shops it around to the highest bidder, you’re saying I shouldn’t call the police or press charges because I didn’t safeguard my keys?
Isn’t that blaming the victim?
Leaving your keys in the car would be stupid. Taking the car would be criminal. I think that is pretty much what I said in my original comment.
Always return found items. But the world is full of sleazy people. The Aspen Times’ motto, “If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen”, certainly applies to an object that the whole cyberworld has been trying to find out about for months. As Jobs knows, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
Briefly, the evidence for three weeks comes from the timing of blog posts and the known time of loss. The evidence for iFinder’s attempts to return comes from Apple support personnel interviewed by Gizmodo.
Start at the start. It’s tempting to call the poor bloody engineer “iLoser” in all of this, but let’s use “Powell” instead. Powell was the first bailee, the bailor being Apple. Likewise I’d call Gizmodo’s editor, Jason Chen, “iVictim” but till there’s a verdict “Chen” will do.
iDrunk and iFinder were, legally speaking, involuntary bailees. Powell and Chen were voluntary bailees. So there were four bailees; Powell, iDrunk, iFinder, and Chen, in that order. Discussion follows.
* We call the man who got the $5,000 “iFinder”, though by all accounts the first finder was someone we could call “iDrunk”. No-one knows who that was, but he was the first bailee. He became the second bailor when he handed the iPrototype to iFinder, thinking iFinder was a friend of Powell. That’s reported in Gizmodo.
* Gizmodo notes that from Powell’s last Facebook entry, iPrototype was lost shortly after midnight of Thursday, March 18. See , which we could call “Reference 1″.
* PC World’s Jared Newman agrees that ” Powell lost the phone on March 18″. Gizmodo broke cover on the device on April 19th. See . Call that Reference 2.
* Chen asserts that he, or Gizmodo, had it for a week; see . That is Reference 3.
Regarding dates, examine the blog post time stamps. Subtracting a month from loss to story gives three weeks from the moment iFinder became an involuntary bailee to the time Chen got possession.
In Reference 1, Chen also describes that interval as “weeks”. Later, in , Chen calls it “Three weeks during which Apple presumably tried—and obviously failed—to get their phone back.” Call that Reference 4.
Regarding evidence that iFinder tried to return the phone, you have to be a bit careful about who he was supposed to return it to. Bear in mind that he was not, in fact, the finder – iDrunk had foisted it on him.
That means iFinder’s first duty as bailee was to return it to iDrunk or the person with lawful possession (Powell) or the person with title (Apple), in that order. And according to his telephone interview with Chen, that’s exactly what he did. This is supported by friends and associates interviewed by other journalists, such as Wired – see (Reference 5).
iFinder made money a condition of access. Other IT journalists were offered the device for money during this time. In the case of Wired, this happened on March 28th, ten days after the loss, but Ref. 5 notes there were ongoing attempts to return it. By his own widely reported account, iFinder had very little to go on. To summarize;
* After iDrunk had disappeared it dawned on iFinder and friends that the likely owner had also gone.
* They waited for him to return for some time, during which they fiddled with iPrototype – it wasn’t password protected.
* There was no ownership label but they did get a glimpse of Mr Powell’s facebook.
* Resolving to sort it out in the morning, they were taken aback to find Apple had remotely bricked it. Trying to recall details with a hangover was a major problem.
* iFinder had no chance of contacting iDrunk. He tried to get in touch with Apple multiple times (Ref. 1) but “No one took him seriously and all he got for his troubles was a ticket number”. That ticket number will come out in court as evidence.
* In Ref. 4, Gizmodo interviewed Apple help personnel who gave iFinder the support ticket: “the guy working next to me got the call from the guy looking to return the phone. From our point of view it seemed as a hoax or that the guy had a knockoff, internally apple doesn’t tell us anything … because we had so little to go on we pushed it off as bogus.”
* Apple failed to action the ticket. This, in an action for damages, would count as contributory negligence in most Westminster jurisdictions. So would the remote disabling. I’ve no idea what California law would make of it.
Will this do?
As an involuntary bailee iFinder was entitled to dispose of the iPrototype in any way he saw fit that didn’t harm the bailor – and the only bailor he reliably knew of was iDrunk. I’d add that the legal tag “nemo dat” applies: you can’t give someone any rights you don’t have yourself.
Powell was entitled to lawful possession, and Apple had title, but iFinder did have the right of access.
In the absence of formal notice from either Powell or Apple, as an involuntary bailee iFinder was perfectly entitled to ask for money for access, and Chen was entitled to pay for it. Both assert that the $5,000 was not money paid for stolen goods, it was paid for access and an exclusive story. Neither Apple nor the district attorney seem inclined to dispute this.
Gizmodo and others, including Apple support, were very concerned about the possibility of a hoax. Formal notice came on April 19th; a scan of Apple’s formal letter to Gizmodo is up at Reference 6, . Till then, as a voluntary bailee without notice of titleholder, I’d say Chen had a common-law right to disassemble iPrototype in order to determine provenance and so fulfil his duty of care. Whether this complied with the California statute is a different question; and whether that statute is constitutional, is another.
Regards, TC
Could you repeat that?