While one might question the morality of what Gizmodo did, here's the breakdown from what I understand.
1 - Apple Engineer Gray Powell goes out to celebrate his birthday and consequently forgets his iPhone 4.0 prototype on the chair next to him when going home.
2 - Person X, not a member of the Gizmodo staff from what I have read, finds the phone and decides to take it with him with the intent to try to find the owner the next day.
3 - Person X, realizing this is not just any iPhone when waking up the next morning, contacts Apple who don't take him seriously when he says he's got a prototype of the next iPhone.
4 - Not getting through to Apple, Person X turns around to Gizmodo and sells the phone for $5000
* immoral part *.
5 - Gizmodo investigates the phone, finds the name of the owner, writes articles, takes pictures and before contacting the owner publishes all the information
* immoral part* .
6 - Gizmodo returns the iPhone
7 - Gizmodo's editor Jason Chen, who wrote the articles, has his home searched by police with a search warrant stating that they have a right to search fo all information regarding
the theft of the iPhone.
You can find a copy of the search-warrant as well as a letter from Gizmodo's lawyer here:
Police Seize Jason Chen's Computers - Iphone 4 leak - Gizmodo
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I can't help but wondering,
if someone stole MY phone, and I found out who stole it through a blog or a newssite, how willing would the police be to go through all those hoops to find the thief? Especially if I had the phone back already. Seriously. The warrant is only made out to find out information about a THEFT, not industrial espionage. <-- this is my only opinion in the matter that sympathizes with Jason Chen, I still think it was a stupid thing to do to "get some exclusives"...
Unless it's all a huge hype-machine for the next iPhone of course..
Edit: I had missed step 4, and I definately agree it should be in there. Thank you to DanGarion and lordscarlet for pointing that out.