If that box is sealed, it has someone else's address on it and you make no effort to return it to them, then you are inarguably a thief. It's no different to taking a parcel from someone's porch.
Yes. The fact that property is unguarded doesn't render it free to any random person. You can legitimately safeguard something, such as moving it off the road, but once you open the box or take the box home, you are a thief. And if the box is sitting on railroad property, you are likely guilty of attempted theft as soon as you pick it up. Also trespassing.
What you say is not true in the slightest. In a lot of the US jurisdictions you can keep what you found provided you report it to the authorities and nobody claims it in some time frame. In other cases you can take what you found if you found it on your land etc. Lots of various laws apply, depending where you live and what exactly you found. If it was likely to be intentionally left where you found it to be later picked up again, or if it was intentionally abandoned etc.
You can even take legal ownership of land that you and the authorities know is not yours provided you use it long enough (adverse possession) and you think a random box left by the side of the road is somehow untouchable?
You have some nerve to equivocate between an anonymous object bearing no clues as to its ownership and a box with an address label on it signifying exactly to whom the parcel belongs. How do you blame an owner who likely lives hundreds if not thousands of miles away for not contacting every police precinct along the shipping path instead of expecting someone who finds the parcel to simply return it to the shipping company so that they can finish the job?
A more generous quote of GP comment provides the answer:
> provided you report it to the authorities and nobody claims it in some time frame
One would expect that "report it to the authorities" covers that problem. The authorities will take care of either contacting the shipping company and letting them know, instructing you on how to do it yourself, or even take possession of the package to return it themselves.
If you find an object with no obvious owner, you either leave it where it lies, or you report it by turning it in somewhere. To the business where you found it, or the Lost & Found department of the transit authority, or the police if all else fails.
I don't see anyone calling up the police to say, "Hi, I found <item> and I'll keep it until someone comes over here to claim it!" because the only people coming over will be the police themselves.
Every place with a Lost & Found service, and the police, regularly liquidate the unclaimed property. You can find lists and auctions on your civic website if they're selling the stuff. They may also donate it to charity or destroy it.
The police or anyone else are not going to stick a tag on a box with your name and number so you can come to claim it after the grace period elapses. That's not how claiming stuff works.
If a package falls off a truck in front of your house you can pick it up and inform the authorities, who'll in turn inform the owner.
If the police or owner care enough to pick it up they can have it, but presumably there's cases where they can't be bothered, then it becomes abandoned property and you can keep it.
Just because you find abandoned property you don't need to go out of your way to mail it to the owner, just inform them and they can come to you.
The "why not just leave it?" aspect of this is easily defended, if the package e.g. contains electronics they'd be damaged by exposure to the elements.
1. Thieves stop a train somehow, spill containers for distraction, run away with valuables.
2. Idiots see stuff lying on the ground and go pick it up causing chaos and confusion.
3. Police arrest some of the idiots. Win win. Thieves go away free and police can claim they arrested some people. This also pads their numbers. Politicians can pretend they were not asleep at the wheel with organized crime under their nose because look only 5% of arrests were organized crime. All we needed to do is arrest more homeless people.
Not sure if this is same in US, but where I am the railway tracks and a fair bit of land alongside it it the property of the railway and usually appropriately fenced and signposted. A dropped or fallen parcel is highly likely to be located on that land and thus not public.
I'd say an anonymous parcel on private land is the concern of the landowner, even with a right-of-way.
In my moral view, yes you are if you do not make at least a minimal effort to locate the properties true owner. For example, calling the phone number written on the outside of the box.
The difference in the road and a train track is one of public and private property. The train track is not public property and even walking down it can lead to an arrest for trespassing, much less picking up boxes and carrying them off.
That particular distinction doesn't really matter: If I drop my wallet in the street and someone finds it and takes all my cash, that's theft regardless of whether it landed on the public road or a short distance away on a private driveway. (Also, I don't think anyone would consider it "finders keepers" if the thief started using the credit-cards!)
So it's theft either way, but the private-ness of the zone may mean additional crimes are getting committed, such as trespassing and/or burglary. (Or worse variations of the same crime, depending on how the laws are written.)
What is practiced by law enforcement and the judicial system.
So while dropping your wallet in the street may technically be a crime, the idea that law enforcement is going to go about seeking justice for the infraction is pretty much laughable in the vast majority of situations unless there is a large amount of corroborating evidence.
>(Also, I don't think anyone would consider it "finders keepers" if the thief started using the credit-cards!)
I mean, that is its own separate crime, and the only one likely to be punished as there is a direct evidence chain where you're accessing an account without permission and performing the act of theft.
You are wrong. In most jurisdictions theft is defined as taking something away from the legal owner. If what you said was true then taking away your own property from the thief who stole it would also be a theft.
No, that's now the scenario the parent poster gave: They never even suggested that the Wallet-Taker was somehow the true legal owner of the cash!
All they said is that the other person, Wallet-Dropper, is something less than the prima facie legal owner. This permits several possibilities, but in every case Wallet-Taker still seems to be doing something wrong:
1. If Wallet-Dropper is a thief, then Wallet-Taker is just a thief stealing from a thief.
2. If Wallet-Dropper is the well-meaning temporary custodian of unclaimed property that they cannot (yet) claim as their own, then Wallet-Taker is a thief, taking to deprive the legal owner (wherever they are) of their property.
3. If Wallet-Dropper is the new legal owner of the discovered cash, that's theft by Wallet-Taker no matter how much you think Wallet-Dropper "didn't really earn it."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft_by_finding