![]() So do Wall Street investors who have turned Apple into a $238-billion company, based on its stock value. Gizmodo and many other websites obsess on the company’s every move. It may not be a matter as weighty as war or domestic tranquillity, but the fate of Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple and its products is hugely important to millions of people. “A stranger’s illegal conduct does not suffice to remove the First Amendment shield from speech about a matter of public concern,” Stevens declared. Vopper) that a radio host could not be held legally liable for broadcasting phone recordings, even though the source of the recordings obtained them illegally. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in a 2001 majority opinion (in Bartnicki v. We’re all the better off when the law bends toward support of the latter, even if it tends to forgive the former. Still, what one (business)man sees as receiving stolen property, another man sees as a robust expansion of freedom of information. ![]() So who deserves our support: condescending and self-congratulatory Gawker or controlling and obsessively secretive Apple? It’s a calculation made all the harder because the new media outlet introduced the oft-corrupting dollar into the journalism equation. Pitted against each other in this expose-that-doesn’t-expose-that-much are Apple Inc., with its imperative of maintaining its property and trade secrets, and Gawker Media, parent of Gizmodo, with its imperative of exploring a company and a product of great public interest. Now here comes the neat punch line … only there isn’t one, because now the tech blog ’s story about how it obtained the missing iPhone has turned into a giant kerfuffle. And the blogger posts his assessment of the new (and possibly improved, though that’s not so clear) iPhone. ![]() The stranger sells the phone to a tech blogger for $5,000. So an Apple engineer walks into a beer garden….Ī story that begins like that should have at least a little potential.Įspecially when you learn that, in said beer garden, the young software engineer loses a top-secret prototype of a next-generation iPhone.
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