My understanding is that a person with decision making power at these factories are negotiating with third party repair shops, agreeing on a price, and selling authentic Apple badged components or Apple schematics to them. In that sense, it is not theft.
My understanding is that this is in absolute violation of Apple's license agreements and contracts with these factories. Those factories do not have a de jure legal right to sell those parts. In that sense, it is intellectual property theft.
If and when these factories put those components on a palette, put that palette into a container, and put that container onto a ship, and that ship sails to a Western country with intellectual property protections, Apple has reported the shipments to customs authorities and gotten them seized as counterfeit parts, despite the fact that they were manufactured as part of the same batches as parts that became devices that were sold in Apple stores. Apple's problem is that China doesn't give a shit about any objections Apple might have to two CCP sanctioned Chinese businesses doing (illegal) business with each other.
It shouldn't be intellectual property theft- Apple ought to be obliged to make these components and schematics available at fair prices to shops like Rossman's. But that's the way it ought to be- in the mean time, it is theft, and those parts are stolen. Hopefully we'll be able to get the laws fixed someday.
No IP violation is a theft unless it involves "a person intentionally takes personal property of another without permission or consent and with the intent to convert it to the taker's use".
It's a violation of copyright, trademark, trade secrets, counterfeiting or patent, but it is not theft. The usage of the verbiage "theft" started in the late eighties to early nineties as part of a campaign to make intellectual property violation sound more severe than it actually is.
The key difference is that, by depriving another person of their property, you are preventing them from using it, where in intellectual property violations, you are merely gaining use without denying use to the creator.
How does selling physical parts that were manufactured for someone else in violation of a contract not fall under this definition? Is the seller paying for the manufacture of these parts, or is Apple?
I don't know the actual situation, but let's say for the sake of argument;
- Apple pays $1M to make 1M chips, with the contract that forbids making these parts to sell third parties.
- A Shenzhen shop pays $15K to make 10K of the same parts, the manufacturer breaches the contract, violates Apple's IP and makes extra parts for the shop. None of this involves "theft" in any meaningful sense of the world.
This sort of scenario is a clear breach of contract, regardless of laws surrounding IP. Apple seems substantially unable or unwilling to retaliate for breach of contract against their own Chinese manufacturing partners. This is a substantial loss of control that sooner or later will come home to roost - because if this can happen to the richest company on the planet, it likely happens to anybody who manufactures anything in China. Simply put, China is the Far West when it comes to civil disputes; "we" ignore this state of things because the margins are still good enough to go there anyway. It's like running a supermarket in a bad part of town: as long as the profit it makes is higher than losses from vandalism and theft, it will stay open. At some point this might stop being the case.
Of course when Prometheus "stole" the fire from Mount Olympus he did not deny Zeus anything, but it was called theft. The fire that he brought to athens was the intellectual property of the Gods.
That “key difference” is what got invented in the early 2000s as part of a concerted effort to justify IP theft. It was never part of the definition of theft before, and indeed it makes no sense; if you steal a Snickers bar from a store, you have not deprived them of the use of the Snickers bar because they never intended to use it themselves. What you have really deprived them of is the opportunity to sell it. So does stealing IP.
The manufacturer of the chip made an extra 10k of product to sell on the side, which is a breach of contract.
But no theft occurred because the manufacturer is supposed to have the schematics.
Legally a rather annoying, wordy space to live in for sure.
Actually, all of that is stealing physical, not intellectual property. Intellectual property is not the right to physical possession, so even to the extent that it can be said to be “stolen” (violation of IP rights are more like trespass than theft) taking physical objects in which it is in one form or another embodied into one’s possession isn’t it.
I am not sure breach of contract/license agreements is IP theft. I bet IP theft has a very specific legal definition that draws a fine line between theft and breach of contract. Apple can of course try to bring these factories to court to seek damages.
Pay is involved, and its Apple authorized recyclers who are selling parts on the black market breaching Apple contract stating everything needs to go into Shredder and get pulverized into dust.
Here is just one example "Apple sues GEEP for not shredding reusable iPhones" https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...
In the case this is a misunderstanding of the US perspective, and not a deliberate misinterpretation, the context taken here by Apple is based on US intellectual property law.
In that context, this would be a criminal offense and would very likely be pursued in court by Apple, leading to punitive damages, loss of contract, or both (e.g., the GEEP lawsuit). Third-shift manufacturing [0] is seen as a serious issue by many large corporations who have their production based in China for this reason.
If the schematics or other intellectual property were transferred to a third party (e.g. another factory) for production, then this would be IP theft, if the use of the word `theft` specifically is the crux of your objection.
I'm not saying the current situation is "right" or "correct", just clarifying the terminology so everyone is on the same page semantically.
[0]: https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1825...
Theft is much broader than that. When apple receives devices that it cannot repair anymore it will just recycle the materials and throw the rest away, there are employees that will take out functioning chips or broken circuit boards and throw them in a publicly accessible garbage container only to come back at night to take the parts out of the trash to resell them.
Then it only concerns those parties and it's literally not our business to worry about.
Whether that type of contract is allowed by the government/law in the first place is an entirely different discussion about commerce and regulation; I wasn't opining on that.
I really doubt that many of those genuine repair parts for iphones and macbooks are stolen, in the sense that somebody loaded up a pallet and took it from its manufacturer without paying. Apple doesn't manufacture most of these things, particularly the ICs and screens, and relies on a whole ecosystem of vendors and subcontractors.
If a third party is paying a reasonably agreed upon market price to a factory to buy extra factory run of stock (example: DRAM ICs, or touchscreens), that's not theft.
You would think that those factories would engage Chinese law enforcement if a significant percentage of their output was literally being stolen without payment, since that sort of thing affects their bottom line and is clearly a crime in their mainland china location.
For people interested in this general topic (parent poster here mentioned living in Shenzhen), go read through all the historical content of Bunnie Huang's blog...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Huang_(hacker)