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Comment by sheldonwt | Hacker News Reader

Can you remind me again how you qualify a phone (lost, drunkenly) as 'stolen'. You seem to be using that word rather loosely, when the person who found that phone in fact found lost property, not stolen property. Nobody stole from Apple here, rather Apple made a grave mistake which it seems in hindsight they then used the police to assist in helping them recover from. How can you say that Apple's clear and apparent ability to influence the actions of the police isn't at least a little bit frightening? A little bit? It doesn't matter whether Gruber or Gawker posted those pictures, the fact of the matter is that the journalist who did post them faced what seems to be police persecution at Apple's direction. Consider, just for a moment, that it had been a Windows Mobile 7 phone. Do you think the police would be breaking into his home?

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Your intuition regarding California Law is wrong.

"One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft."

CAL. PEN. CODE § 485

> without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him

See, the problem is that according to the law you quoted simply picking up and taking the lost phone home is itself not equivalent to theft. You must prove that no "reasonable and just efforts" were made. That paragraph doesn't even say all reasonable and just efforts or even that the most reasonable and just efforts (such as returning it to the beer garden) must be made. Only that some reasonable and just effort must be made. It doesn't even define success as a test for determining if an effort was reasonable and just. Calling and contacting Apple when you realize you have a prototype that has been deactivated remotely so you cannot identify the user is reasonable. The law does not support the blanket assertion that all lost property is stolen. It's just more nuanced than you want to believe. Sorry your absolutism doesn't jive with reality.

You seem to think that language is there to protect owners of lost property. In reality it's there to protect finders of lost property i.e. business owners so that they can dispose of abandoned junk.

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> I believe in doing the right thing as much as the next person but where do we draw the line with expecting too much ethical behavior from people?

I personally believe that law is applicable in this case. If you find someone's phone in the bar, returning it to the bartender is a natural and simple choice, at least in my world.

Selling the phone to the highest bidder was clearly wrong. Even if taking the phone was impulsive decision, holding an "auction" was a well calculated move.

Gizmodo did not buy the phone. They paid for the chance to look it over before turning it over to Apple, which they did once Apple told them it was Apple property.

"Just so you know, we didn’t know this was stolen when we bought it."

http://gizmodo.com/5520479/a-letter-apple-wants-its-secret-i...

Perhaps this will sound cliché, but it is attitudes like yours that contribute to the decline of nations and cultures. Some guy made a simple mistake, and now all bets are off with regards to his property. You seem to be assuming it's okay for a possession to be considered forfeit because it was left somewhere. It makes me sick that American culture is in a place where some people consider it acceptable behavior to take other people's things because they forgot them.

I don't think anyone is saying that taking something someone leaves behind in a bar is not morally dubious. My issue is that by calling this 'stealing' your re-defining the concept of stealing and then couching the argument in terms of theft, which makes it really easy to be absolutist about who's right and wrong.

We don't all live in California, so our legal systems classify what happened differently. I would consider the major mistake in this to be Apple's in allowing something they value so much to be in this situation (how many pre-release iPad's were left in bars?) Some people have taken advantage of this but the only impact seems to be some photos on a gadget blog.

I don't think anyone is saying that taking something someone leaves behind in a bar is not morally dubious.

That is exactly what he said. Even though it is odd to quote from a post two levels above, I will now do so, since I do not think you read it: "Can you remind me again how you qualify a phone (lost, drunkenly) as 'stolen'. You seem to be using that word rather loosely, when the person who found that phone in fact found lost property, not stolen property. Nobody stole from Apple here"

My issue is that by calling this 'stealing' your re-defining the concept of stealing and then couching the argument in terms of theft, which makes it really easy to be absolutist about who's right and wrong.

Let us pretend California law does not state that finding lost property and keeping it to yourself is theft. Now, here is a scenario: Two people, A and B, are at a bar. B leaves his phone at his seat when he gets up and leaves. A takes the phone, leaves, and sells it to someone else for money. During this time, B has made repeated attempts to recover his phone, and A has made no attempts to return it, either through culturally accepted norms (giving it to the bartender) or through direct means (using the information in the phone to find the person or giving it to the police).

We will now base further discussion on this scenario, which is functionally compatible both with your requirement of not qualifying discussion based on the syntactical legality of any person's actions and the actual situation as it is reported to have happened. It is important to note that this has so far not affected the debate in any way with regards to responsibility, morality, or culture.

We don't all live in California, so our legal systems classify what happened differently.

Any relevance of law that qualifies theft has now been removed from an examination of the situation, so we may presume it to have happened, for example, in Florida, or Canada, or Britain. I pose a question:

Has the morality of person A's actions shifted when this scenario is instantiated in another location? For example, in Seattle, person B leaves his phone in a bar. Person A takes the phone, leaves, makes no attempt to return it to the owner, and sells it for money.

If moving from California to Seattle has made this morally sound, then you have in fact proved my point that America's cultural integrity is eroded when compared to much of the rest of the modern world.

I would consider the major mistake in this to be Apple's in allowing something they value so much to be in this situation (how many pre-release iPad's were left in bars?) Some people have taken advantage of this but the only impact seems to be some photos on a gadget blog.

Irrelevant to the discussion, unless there is some implied meaning. Never once did I mention Apple, prototypes, gadget blogs, or the loss of trade secrets. Just one man's personal property.

I personally have three concepts in my head about stealing - perhaps more, if I were to think about it - because, hey, why have a 1-to-1 binding between words and meaning when you can have 1-to-many?

One concept that I have is guided by the Rule of Law, it's entirely up to the laws of the jurisdiction to define the concept of theft. The phrase "is guilty of theft" in the California penal code, where the event happened, is enough for me. I take no offense, as a Nebraskan, that California law defines it in this way.

Another concept that I have is defined by the mindset of the thief. Certain details of the story makes Brian J. Hogan smell like a thief to me. He had the opportunity to take it to the bartender's Lost & Found, but he did not. He didn't try to contact the owner, according to a recent story in Wired:

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.

After that, Brian started shopping the phone around to the highest bidder. These details paint a picture of a thief's mind, to me. Any thoughts he may have had about the owner were drowned out by thoughts of what he could gain. The only person in this tale that might be said to have a conscience is the idiot friend who made an offer to call a technical support line.

Finally, I have a third, more nebulous concept based upon the owner of the item: I put myself in his place, and imagine how I would feel if it were my laptop, my messenger bag, my wristwatch, my phone. In this case, the only thing I can think of is that if the finder can't bring themselves to take the item to the establishment's Lost & Found so I can come back and get it, then he sure as hell better take action to find me. If he knows my name and knows that I have a facebook page, but does not contact me, I know what I'll think about him.

In the end, though, it's only the law that matters. Sure, California's code is different, but I'm amazed at how well it captures the spirit of theft in this opportunistic edge-case.

> by calling this 'stealing' your re-defining the concept of stealing and then couching the argument in terms of theft

When I was 15 years old I used to take money from my parents to go out with friends and stuff like that, without them knowing. They've caught me once, and my defense was basically that I just found it on the floor, what I was going to do? :-)

So this goes both way ... by not calling this stealing you're redefining the concept of stealing and then couching the argument in terms of "finders, keepers".

> We don't all live in California, so our legal systems classify what happened differently.

I live in Europe, and here when you find something you're legally required to turn that over to the police. Of course few people do it, but then again few journalists are stupid enough to buy stolen property and then reveal their sources or the fact that they've bought it.

That's one liberty journalists usually have ... they don't have to reveal their sources.

Then again few journalists are stupid enough to buy stolen property and then reveal their sources or the fact that they've bought it

This is an important fact worth mentioning. Gizmodo should not have said where they got the thing from.

IMO, it was a lost phone right up to the point that the finder decided to sell it, at which point, it became theft. If he decided to keep the phone as a trophy, but not sell it, he would have been on the wrong side of the law, but a) we never would have known about it, and b) it's unlikely someone would have cared enough to track down the finder.

I think that most jurisdictions would consider finding something and not making a good-faith attempt to return it to be indistinguishable from outright theft. Sale of such an item would be hard to justify under any circumstances. (IIRC, airlines sell lost luggage in auctions, but there is a suitably long time permitted for the flyer to claim their lost luggage.)

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