So everybody is looking to find out who “stole” the new iPhone prototype from a bar last week. Here is the latest.

Turns out, the “thief” is a 20-something kid who found the prototype for the new 4G iPhone in a bar, realized what it was, knew it was valuable, and thought he’d make a few bucks selling it to Gizmodo for the scoop.

The Cretan.

Yes, we all know theft is a bad thing, and profiting from someone else’s misfortune is not good. But let’s get real here for a minute. This was a KID. What would you expect him to do? Promptly turn the item over to the local authorities? Come on. He wanted his 15 minutes of fame, and he went for it. Not very imaginative [I would have negotiated for the movie rights], but who can fault him…really…for this? Especially at his age.

…you should not be able to encourage theft by paying for stolen property and profiting by that purchase.

But who is really at fault here? I think you should look beyond the hype, and think about who stood to gain and lose and then consider their motivations. Surely if there were no rags like Gizmodo out there, willing to pay for something they KNEW was stolen in order to get a “scoop”, nobody could sell such an item. I don’t give a rip that this was “news”; you should not be able to encourage theft by publicly paying for known stolen property and profiting by that purchase. If anything should be illegal, that should be. Yet I’ve heard no admonishments for Gizmodo. If anything, they are cooler because they did this. Shameful.

And what about Apple? Steve Jobs, famous for his heavy-handed, paranoid, and Orwellian antics, should be ashamed of himself. Really. Yep, Steve, one of your minions screwed up. Your impenetrable shield of silence was broken. Big friggin deal. You need to get over it and move on. The mature thing to do would be to say “Yep, you got me on that one.”, and take steps to reduce the possibility in the future without sending your personal police force to kick in the door of a 20-year old boy who exercised poor judgement.

And last, but certainly not at all least, what about the Apple engineer who lost the iPhone prototype in the first place? What exactly was this valuable piece of hardware doing in a bar? Not just in a bar, but out in the open? Come on. We all know what happened here. This engineer had one of these babies, and he was just dying to show it to his non-Apple buddies. He takes it to a bar, gets all liquored up, and then starts boasting about how he and Stevie-boy dreamed the whole idea for the iPhone up; how he was the real genius behind Apple. And to prove it, he whips out the proto, something few people in the world had access to. He must have been the coolest guy in that bar…that is, until he went to relieve himself in the bathroom, and passed out face down in the urinal.

If anybody is at fault here, it’s that guy. He is [or perhaps, was] an Apple employee en-charged with the secure handling of valuable Apple proprietary equipment, and he took it to a bar and showed it to people. That’s the only way it could have gotten left there.

So why are we chasing down the 20-year old kid who found it?

We have to be willing to either do the right thing, or fess up and face the music when we don’t. The rest is just emotional and ethical immaturity.