Sunday, May 02, 2010

Appholes

John Stewart on Apple. Heh.

(Nod to Angry Alex)

1 comment:

Shawn said...

that was some quality humor; i just wish he wouldn't have conflated the cops busting down the door with apple busting down the door.

apple showed up at the original finder's house (apparently before he had sold it to gizmodo) and knocked (using technology available to every iphone user via mobileme to locate a lost phone), asking to have the phone back--the cops did the raid and seized the gizmodo editor's computers within his home. It's not entirely clear how much responsibility apple had in involving the police, though I assume it was necessary for them to do so for precedent reasons.

EFF, incidentally, is questioning the legality of the search and seizure.

I was kinda hoping someone would do a post discussing law and legislation with regard to this--Boudreaux seemed a logical choice, but he didn't bite on my email discussing this.

I was wondering if this sort of police interaction is valid, and necessary, or whether this is a case of government intrusion into something that may or may not be a private matter. Of course, we're probably going to know little about whether Apple requested the investigation/reported the crime, but it seems an interesting jumping-off point for discussions of law and legislation. Also, in the growing economy of trade secrets and secretive tech products in general, is this is a true crime that should be investigated by the state regardless of participant's interest (from some sort of overall utilitarian viewpoint) that might dissuade further trade-secret theft and sales?