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What kind of theft, and from whom?

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.

Theft is the wrong word here.

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.

>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".

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?

> 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.

So all of the senses of theft that do apply, which have been in use for millenia, are not "meaningful" because they do not meet the cause of your morality.

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.

You may also find people murdered by words, yet no charges for murder.

I think you are both right: I think the act of stealing is the act of taking something (an idea, an object) without permission from someone else. It doesn't matter how much this "something" costs to make in time, money or effort. In that sense, taking designs without permission and creating electronic parts is theft. However, having said this, I don't believe theft is necessarily a bad thing. I think it's a good thing (to a certain point) that the government steals your money (takes it without permission) as taxation. I also believe that where there is a limited supply - either by design or the nature of the thing - the owner of this supply should be coerced into doing what is not only good for themselves but also for the whole of society. I might be voicing an unpopular opinion here, but in my eyes you don't have the right as a home owner to leave your house empty when there is a shortage of housing. Squatting should be legal in such circumstances. This forces homeowners to keep rent affordable. I also believe that apple keeps these parts off the market to make more profits in a way that is not beneficial for the environment and society as a whole. This makes it a moral imperative to steal these parts and make them available for the general public.

And if Apple sends private data from my iPhone to government or 3rd party, it’s not technically not theft.

If the design of the chips is created abd owned by apple, using that same design to manufacture chips for someone else, is theft of design. Apple spend a lot of time and money creating that design.

The amount of time it takes to make anything is not relevant to the question of whether something can be stolen or not. Parent poster is being pedantic, probably for the sake of making an old point about IP piracy, but let's keep things grounded.

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.

IP theft easily satisfies the quoted definition in your first paragraph. That’s why you had to add an additional “key difference” in your last paragraph.

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.

Stealing a part made in a shop isn't stealing IP. Stealing schematics and methods would be, but not finished products.

And it's not stealing in the strictest sense. it was sold.

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.

How is this not stealing ... Its like i gave you money/raw materials to do something for me. you skim off it and sell it off it is stealing. May not be a legally valid term, but it is stealing.

> Stealing a part made in a shop isn't stealing IP. Stealing schematics and methods would be, but not finished products.

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.

> 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.

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.

>in the sense that somebody loaded up a pallet and took it from its manufacturer without paying.

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...

So not just making repairs as hard as possible but paying people to shred perfectly serviceable hardware to prevent that! Wow, that's beyond evil, for so many reasons!

> 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.

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...

>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.

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.

It's not theft. But still it's most likely a contract violation of the contract between the production company and Apple. Apple would never in a million years allow any of their suppliers to sell Apple specific parts to the aftermarket.

> It's not theft. But still it's most likely a contract violation of the contract between the production company and Apple. Apple would never in a million years allow any of their suppliers to sell Apple specific parts to the aftermarket.

Then it only concerns those parties and it's literally not our business to worry about.

It is our business to worry about. Such gross violation would be stamped out hard in the US and EU. This is one of the reasons it's hard/expensive to finds parts if you are not in Shenzhen. There should be laws that disallow exclusivity of parts.

I think you missed my point. I was saying the violation isn't our business and by its nature it is in no way comparable to theft or other crimes. i.e. private parties have a dispute that they need to settle privately. It's not on us to police whether they stick to their contracts.

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.