Quote:
Originally Posted by nfotiu
Companies are responsible for protecting their own trade secrets. The best way to do that is not leave prototypes behind in a bar. The police should not be spending the public's money investigating the improper handling of a phone that was LOST.
If a NASA engineer got drunk and took the space shuttle out for a spin, only to abandon it outside a bar, then yeah, I don't think people who opened up the hood and took pictures should be charged with a crime.
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but if they bought a 'brand new! grandma driven (only on sundays), smoke free! space shuttle' from the shady terrorist looking guy they would be implicated because
a reasonable person should know that the space shuttle was obviously stolen.
to add another analogy to the litany of analogies we have going on here - if you were to find a guy selling really cheap stereo equipment from the back of his van you would expect that they were stolen. the same concept applies.
the issue isn't that somebody stole it from the bar/lot, its that
it was then repurchased by gizmodo. that's why engadget didn't buy it even though they apparently had first crack at it. and you can't defend gizmodo by saying they didn't know it was an iPhone because otherwise they would never have paid $5000+ for it.
it is a crime to purchase material that does not belong to the seller. tearing it apart and posting photos on the internet is stupid because (no $hit) it attracts unwanted (police) attention. its like rebellious teenagers making videos of their drunken shenanigans and posting them on youtube - you're gunna get caught.