Apple Should Sue! vs. No, Just Suck It Up

Jeff Bercovici has been noodling the lost iPhone story and finds himself "outraged" by Gizmodo's acquisition of the top-secret gadget. It's clear to him the finder hardly tried to find the real owner. "Put simply, Gawker Media brazenly, publicly flouted the law," he writes at AOL's Daily Finance. "It subsidized a crime: the selling of stolen merchandise. Then it published a misleading, whitewashed account of the seller's actions ... in order to disguise its own culpability in the matter." Apple should sue, he says.

Bad idea, writes Ed Oswald at PC World. Courts rarely go after the press over confidential leaks, and "there is just too much to prove on Apple's part to make any case against Gizmodo worth it." Besides, Apple is also culpable for its own stupidity in allowing a relatively low-level employee to walk around with the phone. "The worst thing it could do is turn around and make this a bigger issue with lawsuits, which are sure to only make the company look bad." (More Apple stories.)