Gizmodo Says Police Haven’t Been in Touch Over Lost IPhone
April 23, 2010, 6:46 PM EDTBy Connie Guglielmo and Karen Gullo
April 23 (Bloomberg) -- Gizmodo.com, which obtained a secret iPhone prototype after it was left behind at a bar by an Apple Inc. engineer last month, said it hasn’t been contacted by police investigating the case.
“We haven’t been contacted by law enforcement,” said Gaby Darbyshire, chief operating officer of Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo. The blog said earlier this week that it returned the phone to Apple after a request from the company’s top lawyer.
Gizmodo got the iPhone after Apple engineer Gray Powell left the device in a bar in Redwood City, California, on March 18, according to the blog. A patron found the device on a stool and sold it to Gizmodo for $5,000 after trying unsuccessfully to contact Apple about it, the blog said.
Stephen Wagstaffe, chief deputy district attorney for San Mateo County, which has jurisdiction over Redwood City, declined to say whether there is an investigation over the iPhone.
“If there is a case that is investigated and able to be submitted for prosecution, it will be handled by this office,” Wagstaffe said in an interview today.
Gizmodo wrote about the iPhone prototype after disassembling it. The site said it wasn’t certain the phone was legitimate until receiving the letter from Apple lawyer Bruce Sewell on April 19. The letter requested the return of “a device that belongs to Apple.” Gizmodo said it returned the prototype to the company that same day.
Not ‘Finders Keepers’
Cnet.com, citing an unnamed law enforcement official, reported earlier today that a Silicon Valley crime task force may be looking into the circumstances around the lost iPhone.
“The finder may have broken the law,” said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University Law School in Detroit. “The law of theft isn’t ‘finders, keepers.’ If you know that something has just been mislaid, you can take it and return it, but you can’t take it and keep it, or sell it.”
Amy Cornell, a public information officer for the task force -- known as the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team, or REACT -- said today that any investigation would be handled by San Mateo County officials and referred questions to Wagstaffe.
Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
--Editors: Nick Turner, Lisa Wolfson
To contact the reporters on this story: Connie Guglielmo in San Francisco at cguglielmo1@bloomberg.net; Karen Gullo in San Francisco at kgullo@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net
