But it wasn't a bag of money, it was information (that we mostly already knew). In the scheme of things this is a meaningless leak, it's just huge news because Apple/Jobs is obsessively secretive. I actually enjoy seeing them beat at their own game.
Speculation is one thing, but knowing exactly what your competitor will be selling two months before it hits the market is worth a lot more than $10k to the right people.
I don't think that's true. The mobile industry is a pretty incestuous place, everybody kind of knows what everybody else is doing. All the companies buy parts from the same suppliers, trade employees, and see the same market trends. Two months isn't enough time for anybody to do anything significant, except perhaps for the chinese knockoffs to make it to market faster.
Two months isn't enough time for anybody to do anything significant, except perhaps for the chinese knockoffs to make it to market faster.
Two months is more than enough time, though, to plot a "leak" that buries your competitor's marketing in the noise floor. I wonder if any other major phone manufacturers were planning to announce anything this week?
While I don't disagree with you in general, I'd be hard pressed to imagine an announcement that drowns out Apple's product launch PR short of "hey, we found aliens, and we're selling their communicators".
It was not information. It was a physical object that belonged to somebody else. Beyond that it was intellectual property that belonged to somebody else. Gizmodo is morally indefensible here, I think.
It's unquestionably dishonest but I suspect it will make for an interesting court case as Gizmodo tries to claim the person who sold it is a "source" and hence they should have a right to anonymity. I don't think it holds up but it's up for debate. There's no question that people like Mark Felt (aka Deep Throat) stole documents from the White House which is a much bigger crime than this.
Regardless of whether they protected that person, they would appear (IANAL) be liable for damages under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act - given their understanding of how significant the device was and where it was from - and if it's true they paid big $ for it, they'd be liable to have those damages doubled for improper methods of acquiring the thing.
There is no actual right to anonymity for sources, is there? That's just a convention among journalists. They go to prison when they refuse to cough up sources.
There's a big difference. It's not actually worth $11k to Apple. They don't actually want all the details out there yet (probably. I could see some of their leaks being intentional ways to get people to hold out for summer and not buy Android phones now), but they didn't directly lose $11k by losing the iPhone.
Technically, prototypes are usually worth much more than $11k (hand built consumer electronics as complicated as mobile phones are expensive), but it wasn't the money that was important to Apple. It's the secrecy, Apple is obsessed with it. This is the company that announced everything about the iPad months ahead of time but wouldn't even let Apple Store staff use it once until the day of launch. It's useful to a point, but they have taken it way over the edge.
Edit: This isn't a matter of what's legal or not, or that it's Apple or not – it's a general issue with peoples' opportunistically predatory nature.