4 ms·

> those shops illegally obtain the parts (whether counterfeit or stolen, since Apple won't intentionally sell them to anyone) and resources (schematics, softwar

> those shops illegally obtain the parts (whether counterfeit or stolen, since Apple won't intentionally sell them to anyone) and resources (schematics, software, etc) to be able to do so. This situation is both good and bad. Stolen parts are good 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For people interested in this general topic (parent poster here mentioned living in Shenzhen), go read through all the historical content of Bunnie Huang's blog...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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Huang_(hacker)

rowanG077 5y ago
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.
- dataflow 5y ago
  > 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.
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    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.
    - dataflow 5y ago
      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.
nwallin 5y ago
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.
- jaggederest 5y ago
  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.
  - jolux 5y ago
    >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?
rasz 5y ago
>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-geep-iphone-recycle-shred/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...
- m4rtink 5y ago
  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!
imtringued 5y ago
>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.
hwbehrens 5y ago
> 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&context=student_scholarship https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1825...

rowanG077 5y ago

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.

dataflow 5y ago
> 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.
- rowanG077 5y ago
  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.
  - dataflow 5y ago
    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.

nwallin 5y ago

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.

jaggederest 5y ago
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.
- jolux 5y ago
  >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?

rasz 5y ago

>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-geep-iphone-recycle-shred/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...

m4rtink 5y ago
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!

imtringued 5y ago

>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.

hwbehrens 5y ago

> 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&context=student_scholarship https://scholarship.shu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1825...