Via a Danish newspaper I came across a videoclip from 1996 where Steve Jobs is saying that Apple shamelessly steals from others. When Jobs say “steal” I don’t think that it is in the “illegal appropriating IP” kind of stealing he means. He talks about that Macintosh was successful because of the different backgrounds of the creators. My guess is that he means “being inspired”, although the user interface was very much “inspired” by work done by Xerox Parc.
Thinking about the rebirth of Apple (Ipod, Imac, Ipad) it actually makes sense. What Apple did was to get a bunch of media people and Ad agency people together over a caffe latte and let them steal from their world and use it in the computer design. And viola a caffe latte inspired pc!