It was the talk of the town for a while in the blogosphere: A man finds an iPhone prototype on a floor in a bar, sells it to a technology news website and all hell breaks loose. Police raid a journalist’s home, take computer equipment and try to determine whether any laws are broken — although it what it looks like is Apple calls in the thugs to get their stuff back.
But the iPhone 4 is on shelves now — though it has problems of its own — and most people have forgotten the matter of the scoop of the century.
And now the question of whether Gizmodo had the right to the prototype device — and whether the authorities had the right to storm see their notes — will quickly fade as well and remain largely unresolved. The website has struck a deal with prosecutors to cooperate by turning over its writer’s unpublished notes, and the investigation is therefore likely to be dropped soon.
And that’s too bad, really, because now there will be no court ruling to set a precedent and clarify what exactly we were seeing in this case that came out of nowhere and caught so many people’s attention. The next time Apple doesn’t like what a journalist publishes, who’s to stop them from calling up their contacts in law enforcement and having something done about it? What qualifies as a violation? This we will never truly know, now. They can do anything, and they know it.
The man who found the phone and sold it is still under investigation, but he hasn’t been charged, according to the Associated Press.
