Anyone who has seen anything written by an actual attorney could tell you that the letter looks extremely amateurish.
Don't Fuck with Apple - Not even if you're Gizmodo?
- Thread starter ContentMantra
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Anyone who has seen anything written by an actual attorney could tell you that the letter looks extremely amateurish.
1: It cites non-controlling/non-relevant "caselaw" from a different jurisdiction
2: He sends it to the cop. First off, the JUDGE makes the legal decision whether or not the evidentiary threshold has been met, the cop is just the tool that carries out very basic instructions on what to seize. The minute you have police officers trying to make a legal judgment on the res judicata implications of shield statutes from a non-controlling jurisdiction, you have a problem. There is a reason search warrants are mostly checkboxes and written at a level a 15 year-old can read, so the cops DONT get put into the position of having to be "lawyers/judges". If the warrant says "grab all computers and the pet turtle" then the cop knows "guess I better find that turtle", they don't have to know the legal ramifications, that is for the lawyers to fight out later on in civil court.
3. This COO/"legal representative" doesn't know the difference between civil and criminal law. You don't get to say "Im protected cuz I'm a journalist, dur" when the issue is a criminal one. Receiving stolen property is the obvious criminal charge here, it doesn't have anything to do with a CIVIL action over a journalist being protected from revealing their "sources". I doubt Apple will actually pursue it too far, but I really doubt that anybody at Gizmodo can say with a straight face they didn't "know or have reason to know" that the damn phone didn't belong to the guy selling it to them for 5k.
I could go on, but moral of the story, Gizmodo got the story/buzz they wanted. Paying for the phone was not a good idea, this is pretty much the definition of receiving stolen property under California statute. Apple will get their phone back, they will check out the dude's computer doesn't have any proprietary/trade secret info on it (i.e. part numbers, outsourced manufacturer's names, etc), and everybody will go back to living their merry lives.