Except that's not a carte blanche shield. If a computer used for journalism was also used to store, say, records of a drug-running ring, would that computer be inviolable? Or seizable, with a warrant, as evidence in the commission of a crime?
IOW: Running a blog or being a journalist doesn't protect your computers from being impounded when you break the law and happen to also blog about doing so.
BTW, was it really stolen? It's obviously wrong to sell something you found before doing a reasonable effort to return it to its owner, but where is the line between finding and stealing?
Essentially, there is a California law that says if you find something, you're compelled to either return it to its owner, or turn it over to the police if the rightful owner can't be found. So the very fact that he failed to turn it into the police converted it from an act of "finding" to an act of "stealing".
Well said. I'm surprised Gizmodo people are making 'I'm a news organization' noises at the moment - it's a flaky excuse, and has little to do with the charges.
Actually...
Appendix B, paragraph 4: 'Printed documents, images, and/or notation pertaining to the sale and/or purchase of the stolen iPhone prototype and/or the sale and/or transfer of trade secret information pertaining to the iPhone prototype.'