No, it's not theft. Theft is when you take away something [an object] that belongs to someone else, with the intention to never return it.
You seem to be referring to English Law, but even there theft refers to "property", which may be something other than an "object" and the definition of "intention never to return it" is liberal enough to cover cases where the thief changes their mind later and returns the property.
Any law that includes intent is, IMHO, poorly conceived as it requires the prosecution to convince a jury of an internal mental state.
In general, absolute statements like "theft is..." are likely to be incorrect. We're talking legal definition here and specifically, in this case, legal definition in California. Also, laws change so the definition of theft can change, so any such statement needs to be qualified by a time frame.
Find some kind of text file to work on.
Just about anything will do: an HTML file,
contact list,
Start playing around writing programs to search for text and print things out. Maybe read the file and write it to stdout. Then change some things before writing it back out (like changing all "Bill" to "William"). Just play around and learn how to use the language.
At this point you will have the basics down and can start doing more complicated things.
Some other suggestions:
The whole concept of patents is to protect the patent inventor against competition and give him or her a monopoly. 'Patents are anticompetitive' is a tautology. It never in the past therefore was considered a valid argument against patents.
Giving the inventor a temporary monopoly is not the purpose of patents. The purpose of patents has always been to encourage innovation. The means to that end is to ensure just compensation to inventors. Today so many trivial things are patented that it's almost impossible for the small developer (AKA, software inventor) to be sure they aren't violating someone's software patent.
My favorite example is when Xerox forced Palm to abandon Graffiti because it violated Xerox's Unistrokes patent. It's not that Graffiti represented letters the same way Unistrokes did. But Xerox was granted a patent on the very idea of using a single unbroken stroke for each letter. I would definitely call that anticompetitive.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Gotta wonder what the world would be like if it were not just illegal to steal a car, but also illegal for anyone else to build one.
"Conversion, fastidious Goddess, loves blood better than brick, and feasts most subtly on the human will." -- Virginia Woolf, "Mrs. Dalloway"