Look at it this way if I steal your trade secrets and clone your product after you spent R&D money on it I’ve essentially “stolen” both a part of your revenue and your investment.
Music, film and games cost money to develop and produce pirating them does incur a financial penalty and that does fall under the common definition of theft.
However as far as Apple goes if you buy a copy of their OS you can easily consider that acceptable since EULA restrictions on the usage can be ethically counter argued.
Wouldn't leaving a bad review of a bad product be considered theft under this definition?
Of course, just like with piracy, it would not provable that the revenue was guaranteed in the first place. But companies would absolutely try and litigate over it anyway.
I suppose this discussion is unrelated to this thread, though.
You can’t steal something from somebody if they still have it after the “theft” (the IP) or if they never had it in the first place (the revenue).
And in any case you are arguing about semantics, "theft" is also technically not a singular legal definition but an amalgamation of different civil and criminal legal statues.
In most jurisdictions intangible property also does fall under the broader definition of theft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft
A key term is intent to deprive, hence most people nicking a car will be done for taking without consent - no need to prove an intent to permanently deprive.
Copyright infringement is a whole separate law and is clearly not theft as there's no intent to permanently deprive.
The content companies had giant advertising campaigns trying to brand this as "theft" or "stealing". Of course, when they sued someone they used the proper term: "IP violation"
I'm not arguing if it's acceptable or not, but it's not the same as theft which leaves the owner without the item.