In fact, copying can be theft.

Copying illicit data constitutes copyright infringement at its best, or industrial espionage at its worst.

Theft is a different type of crime involving actual things.

Exactly! Btw, the specific term of art for "actual things" that are subject to theft is "rivalrous" (adj): a good whose consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers.

You can commit theft of a rivalrous good, like an apple or a computer. You cannot, however, do the same to a file or a song or an idea. I wish more people understood this difference. Society would be better for it.

I'm not sure how society would benefit from a better understanding of a technical difference between these two crimes.

I take it as axiomatic that understanding the truth is better than believing in a falsehood. The latter almost always leads to gaps that can be exploited for potentially nefarious purposes.

In this particular case, the reason that theft is wrong (because it deprives another person) is very different than the reason that copyright infringement is illegal (because the founders wanted to encourage invention by granting limited monopolies). If people believe that copyright infringement is theft, however, then powerful corporations like Disney can convince them that copyrights should last indefinitely.

The word "theft" can have different meanings depending on context. Most people think in ethical terms rather than legal.

Well then I guess there exists a difference in ethics. Theft involves deprivation of the specific thing taken. So deleting the original data after copying it might consist of theft.

> Theft involves deprivation

Not necessarily. Theft is simply taking something you shouldn't. That includes taking by duplication. Or perhaps you'd like to think it as the deprivation of potential profits.

>which makes the theft or misappropriation of a trade secret a federal crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret

Wrong.

There's no way in hell an employee contract would ever let someone copy documents and use them after leaving the company. The intellectual property belongs to Google, not the individual creators and certainly not to any other employee.