I think "moral clarity" over this kind of thing was lost decades ago, when it became common for companies to buy/borrow/find prototypes, and rarely prosecuted. It's common knowledge among chip-design companies that as soon as your prototype board hits the fab (unless you're someone like IBM or Intel with your own fabs), it's going to be in your competitor's hands: NVidia and ATI operate on the assumption that as soon as a chip's sent to Taiwan, it's going to their competitor too. Nobody is ever prosecuted for that, either, on the side of the seller or on the side of the buyer.
Yes, technically selling found property is a crime, but morally, this looks more like a trade-secret dispute between businesses than a normal stolen-property dispute, i.e. the harms suffered are not primarily the loss of the device, but of the secret information. And I think people are pretty jaded when it comes to inter-business trade-secret/corporate-espionage sorts of disputes, because it happens all the time and nobody important ever goes to jail for it, even though there's a lot of wink-wink in which executives are aware of it.
The main difference here seems that it was made public instead of kept secret, and the people doing it were amateurs. If Gizmodo were a consulting firm instead of tabloid, paid $5k to see the prototype for a bit, took a bunch of photos and information, quietly returned it or didn't, and then quietly sold that info to one of Apple's competitors, we probably would never have heard of it. (There's a whole little cottage industry doing teardowns of "found" hardware.) I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs himself has purchased such information at some point in his long business career--- taking care to maintain plausible deniability of course.
Your argument seems to be: everybody is doing it, so it's not morally wrong.
Would you feel the same way if it was your intellectual property that was stolen? What if you spent the last year of your life in stealth mode, working 120 hour weeks and Gizmodo published your business plan on the web for everyone to see?
It's more like: this isn't morally wrong in the sense that stealing someone's iPhone is wrong, but morally wrong in the sense that corporate espionage is wrong, which is a whole different and fairly complex beast.
Mostly, I don't think it's any worse when Gizmodo publishes it on the web for all to see than when the tech companies buy and teardown "found" prototypes. If people want a wholesale clampdown on that sort of thing, applied evenly, that might be worth considering.
This might have something to do with the fact that the US doesn't have any extradition treaties with China or Taiwan. People do go to jail over this if their activities are discovered while they're in US jurisdiction.
The management of these companies is mostly in the U.S. and knows about it, though, even if they're careful never to themselves touch the "found" prototypes.
Perhaps so, but in most economic espionage cases the police are tipped off by the competitors to whom the secrets are offered - possibly out of fear that they're being set up for a sting, but that's neither here nor there.
Yes, technically selling found property is a crime, but morally, this looks more like a trade-secret dispute between businesses than a normal stolen-property dispute, i.e. the harms suffered are not primarily the loss of the device, but of the secret information. And I think people are pretty jaded when it comes to inter-business trade-secret/corporate-espionage sorts of disputes, because it happens all the time and nobody important ever goes to jail for it, even though there's a lot of wink-wink in which executives are aware of it.
The main difference here seems that it was made public instead of kept secret, and the people doing it were amateurs. If Gizmodo were a consulting firm instead of tabloid, paid $5k to see the prototype for a bit, took a bunch of photos and information, quietly returned it or didn't, and then quietly sold that info to one of Apple's competitors, we probably would never have heard of it. (There's a whole little cottage industry doing teardowns of "found" hardware.) I wouldn't be surprised if Jobs himself has purchased such information at some point in his long business career--- taking care to maintain plausible deniability of course.