Gizmodo Officially Not Being Charged in iPhone 4 Case
The District Attorney of San Mateo County is moving forward in the case of the iPhone 4 prototype we posted about last year. Fortunately, nobody from our team is being charged. — Here's our parent company, Gawker Media's official statement on the matter:
Context & Ripple Effects
The case closes out a fifteen-month arc that began in spring 2010, when San Mateo County deputies searched a Gizmodo editor's home after the site published details of the lost iPhone 4 prototype. Gawker Media invoked California's journalist shield law to seek reversal of that search, and by May 2010 media outlets were fighting for access to the court records in the probe.
With the District Attorney now declining to charge anyone on the Gizmodo team while moving the case forward against the man who found the prototype in a bar and sold it, the split outcome lands squarely on the shield-law question Gawker raised: whether the publisher is treated as press or as a receiver of stolen goods. The story drew same-day pickups from both CNET and the San Jose Mercury News, underscoring how closely Silicon Valley watched it.
First-order effects
- Gawker Media and its Gizmodo staff exit the case without criminal exposure, removing the legal overhang that had shadowed the blog since the 2010 search.
- Criminal liability shifts entirely to the man who found the prototype in a bar and sold it to Gizmodo, whom prosecutors have charged as the case proceeds.
Second-order effects
- Rival tech outlets gain clarity on the boundary of leak reporting: publishing a found prototype drew no charges against the publisher, which lowers the perceived risk of similar scoops.
- Apple's prototype-secrecy apparatus takes a hit, since the enforcement path now runs through individuals rather than through the publications that monetize leaks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, leak cases will settle into a structure where sources and intermediaries bear criminal risk while shield-law arguments protect the outlet — raising the stakes for whoever physically handles a lost device and leaving the press-versus-property question formally unresolved.
The trend: Tech-press leak prosecutions are converging on a model where publishers lean on journalist-shield protections while individual finders and sellers absorb the charges.