How Arrington Would Have Handled The Stolen iPhone Story | Hacker News Reader

How Arrington Would Have Handled The Stolen iPhone Story

techcrunch.com

45 pointscj26 comments

It's very easy to say things like this after the fact; "I would never have done that".

However, despite my vague dislike of Arrington I believe he wouldn't have actually paid for it.

I disapprove of his conceit in posting this though...

He does say that they have declined to purchase information in the past, which lends credibility to his claim.

In case some weren't aware, Arrington is a Stanford Law School graduate and was previously was a lawyer at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/michael-arrington

Well, sure, but he practiced as a corp/finance lawyer, not a criminal or IP attorney (which seem to be the relevant facets here). And in the OP he says, specifically, "I’m not going to go into the legal issues around this because I’m just not qualified."

That's true, but his opinion is probably worth more than some random guy at least in this respect

Hindsight is 20/20. Being a lawyer didn't help him to put any contracts in place before committing to the Crunchpad project...

(note that I use the word “stolen” only to keep the description brief, not in any legal way)

If Arrington wanted to leave the description "brief" he wouldn't have needed a parenthetical explanation.

I agree that paying for the phone is the one sticky point here. If no money changed hands, this would be a much more solid case to enforce bloggers' and journalists' rights. The money taints things... but I still think this could go either way.

(I would argue that the person that found the phone was an employee that discovered the phone in his normal course of work. Then the money is for "being at work" rather than "selling us stolen goods". It's like escort services -- you pay for the escort service; the sex afterwards is free. Or something.)

How about we read "How Arrington Would Have Handled The Stolen Twitter Document Story"?

Hypocrisy is lovely.

I'm not sure why you didn't - it's right there in the linked article. Perhaps the throwaway disguise is a clue?

If I had found the iphone... I would have walked around SFO asking people if they lost an iPhone prototype. Starting on Market Street and working my way down to San Jose.

Being that the iPhone is very popular, lots of people would have wanted to see it so... I would have charged them $5 no wait... $20 each to hang out with the iphone for 1 minute, and $50 each for a Polariod of them and the Prototype. I would have continued this pattern until I:

1.) Talked with everyone in the SFO area 2.) Could not carry anymore money 3.) Ran in to Steve Jobs and returned the lost prototype to it's rightful owner.

Eventually I would have found the owner and could sleep easy at night knowing I did everything I could to return it, In the end I would have made way more money than $5000 and returned the iphone.

Or you could just have gone to Apple's HQ.

Nah... I like my "Fanboys" (http://www.imdb.com/find?s=all&q=Fanboys) style adventure better. Eventually my pattern would have taken me their.

Personally I would have bought it, contacted Steve Jobs directly and right away (not called up Apple's support line, who of course cannot help with this issue), given him the phone without any questions or favors asked, and then just taken my chances that he would remember my publication in favorable light somewhere further down the line.

Surely the issue here is that the iPhone was lost property, and knowing full-well who the owners were (and who to give it back to) both parties - the guy in the bar and the Gizmondo editor - struck a deal for someone's lost phone.

Here in the UK, at least, it's an offense to knowingly sell-on lost property. Arrington seems to gloss over this and is only looking at it for scoop value. Details of an iPhone 4G prototype isn't information that could be argued needs to be exposed to the public. That's not journalism.

> Apple’s complaint will be that information about the phone leaked early, giving competitors a head start on copying the features. That’s a reasonable complaint

Really? I'm fairly sure there was nothing particularly interesting in the leak other than the leak itself. Res improvements and a front facing cameras? Yawn.

After the leak, 42% of Mashable readers preferred an HTC Incredible over the unreleased iPhone.

I bet it would involve lots of yelling.

They would have done the same thing as gizmodo ... milked it for as many ad impressions and articles as possible.

Does every TechCrunch post appear on HN now? n.b. no offense, OP

Nope, just every iPhone 4 story.

Michael Arrington suffers from the worst possible case of selective memory imaginable. It wasn't that long ago that TC was involved in their own scandal when they gave a kid a Macbook pro in exchange for an article that at least three quarters of the tech community debunked as fud.

Then this happens, and he actually grandstands and says "I would never have done that", and tries to tell us he'd actually be an ethical reporter?

And the Oscar goes to...

To be fair the kid asked for the laptop without Arringtons knowledge. They fired the offending employee and removed all his material from Techcrunch. They were very transparent about the whole incident

Thank you for the clarification on this. I stand by my point that Arrington isn't exactly the most scrupulous tech blogger out there either, and this article just reeks of self-importance and conceit.

this article just reeks of self-importance and conceit

Whoa, TechCrunch is a blog?

You're putting us all down. Blogging is no more inherently self-important than speaking at all.

I find blogs to be more self-aggrandizing than traditional opinion columns. But indeed, I agree that it is unfair to pin general human traits on blogs.

Oh, and if I sound like I'm on a high horse... I would do the same thing that Arringtion does, if only somebody cared what I thought about anything ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com