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.
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.