Don't try to make a Guy Fawkes defense. No single act he did was a crime, per se, BUT he did try to blow up Parliament!
Possession of someone else's property without a good explanation of why you got it is pretty much evidence of participation in a theft to one degree or the other.
You will notice Apple wasn't going after the device ~ they had that ~ they went after his pictures of the design.
The kid who busted into Sarah Palin's emails probably thought what he did was legal ~ he's going to jail for a long time!
Remember, theft wasn't invented yesterday so everybody has had thousands of years to work their way through all the known or knowable theft schemes and have written laws to penalize people who involve themselves in them. I am confident the law will work for Apple to protect their interest in their own property.
The explanation is in the article along with the person who found it attempts to return it TO APPLE.
http://gizmodo.com/5520729/why-apple-couldnt-get-the-lost-iphone-back
He didn't.
The Apple worker forgot he had a phone with him, and left it at some bar. That's his fault. Noobody stole anything from him.
Plus the guy that found it, made serous attempts to find the owner and return it, without any success.
The device was left in some bar for crying out loud, and to quote “SeaHawkFan, :”The guy tried to give it back and Apple wouldn’t take it, the phone was abandoned property. Where’s the theft?”
You will notice Apple wasn't going after the device ~ they had that ~ they went after his pictures of the design.
Apple refused to take it back, when the original finder contacted them. That makes it abandoned property.
“The kid who busted into Sarah Palin’s emails probably thought what he did was legal ~ he's going to jail for a long time:
You are kidding right?
For the Sarah Palin email case to be the same as this one, the original finder of the iPhone, would have had to break into Apple's headquarters and stolen the device. That far from the case. The device was left at a bar.
The analogy here would be if Sarah Palin printed off her email, then left the printed email at a bar, and some kid found the email and read it. No one would be charging the kid of that is what had happened.
Possession of someone else's property without a good explanation of why you got it is pretty much evidence of participation in a theft to one degree or the other.
It's even more than that under California law, actually. If you appropriate the property for yourself, even if you didn't steal it but actually "found" it -- and sell it -- you've committed a crime...
That's the problem here... :-)