Oops. Seems like Gizmodo Editor Jason Chen is in plenty hot water for publishing details about Apple’s new 4G iPhone before the official company release date. It seems that an Apple employee took the phone with him to a bar, left it behind, and Gizmodo bought it for between $5 and $10,000 dollars from the person who found it. Apparently, that’s not a good thing to do in California.
The District Attorney seized Chen’s computers but haven’t begun to search through them. Gizmodo’s attorneys filed a lawsuit claiming that Chen should be protected from investigation by California’s Shield Laws and TechCrunch reports the San Mateo district attorney has put the investigation on hold while they review the laws.
Computer World explains that shield laws are intended to protect sources and not journalists so this is a pretty uncertain defense.
But this might not be a shield-law case at all, says Business Insider’s Henry Blodgett. The Shield Law doesn’t apply if Chen himself is suspected of breaking the law, not protecting someone else who broke the law.
“Journalist shield laws are about journalists being able to protect sources who may have committed crimes. They’re not a license for journalists to commit crimes themselves,” Daring Fireball’s John Gruber explains.
Scott Adams created two Dilbert comics about this fiasco. He comments “You will never see these in newspapers.”