In other words, when Picasso and Jobs use the word “steal”, are they really referring to a ”theft of concept“ as opposed to a theft of implementation (i.e copying)? Are we misconstruing the spirit of Jobs’ statement in an overzealous effort to label him a hippocrite, or are we pulling semantic hairs in an attempt to defend him?
We’ll go ahead and assert that the way Jobs intended the word “steal” to be interpreted in the video above and in the recent Apple press release are completely different. In the former, ‘steal’ seems to take on a more abstract definition, whereas in the latter, it seems to imply, you guessed it, flat out copying.
The following quote from Thomas Stephen is particularly insightful: