Categories: OLD Media Moves

The law, the iPhone and Gizmodo

Jeff Bercovici of DailyFinance.com writes about whether the police search of a Gizmodo reporter’s house in the wake of it reporting about a lost iPhone prototype was legal.

Bercovici writes, “Representatives of Gawker Media, which owns Gizmodo, demanded the immediate return of Chen’s computers on the grounds that their search and seizure was illegal under a California statute that protects journalists from having to turn over ‘unpublished information obtained or prepared in gathering, receiving or processing of information for communication to the public.’ In the opinion of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the warrant was invalid under both state and federal law, and the execution of it could undermine any criminal case in the works, since evidence obtained through the search will have to be excluded.

“But that interpretation of the law is far from unchallenged. If the investigators were trying to determine not merely whether the iPhone was stolen in the first place, but whether Gizmodo’s acquisition of it constituted criminal receipt of stolen goods, then the warrant may well have been valid, says Eugene Volokh, a professor at the UCLA School of Law.

“‘Generally speaking, while these protections extend to information that was revealed to the reporter by people who might have been witnesses or even themselves criminals, the protection does not extend to criminal conduct of the reporter himself or even of criminal conduct the reporter has witnessed,’ says Volokh, whose areas of expertise include free speech and cyberspace law. ‘So to the extent that what’s being investigated here is the possible criminal receipt of stolen property, that would be the sort of thing that could be searched for. Reporters have no more right to commit a crime than the rest of us do.'”