The word has become overloaded in recent decades to mean other things as well, but for over a thousand years theft has mean taking something from someone permanently
> for over a thousand years theft has mean taking something from someone permanently
Nothing in your comment is in contradiction to mine, or suggests that the word has been “overloaded”. That’s what theft is. Intellectual property is property, trade secrets are property.
You denied that deprivation was ever part of the term
Your statement was
> There is nothing in the word “theft” that implies depriving someone of physical property.
Where it’s literally there in dozens of definitions across the English language.
“Intellectual property” is a new legal construct, at most 500 years old, compared with physical ownership which dates back millennia. The term itself is a mere 200 years old, but mainly ignored in the US until just a few decades ago.
> There is nothing in the word “theft” that implies depriving someone of physical property.
It is always depriving of something. Just not always of physical something. The rest of my comment goes on about depriving of non-physical things.