It depends. They may view it as people just fucking around with the equivalent of "video game money" - no one gets prosecuted when thefts happen in EVE online, because it's a game. And not only that, a lot of people view it as a way to get around government regulation. People in the government might take that as an affront and think "Well, you're on your own then".
Also, in order to prosecute as a theft, you'd need to prove that Bitsyncom actually stole something, and didn't just fall behind schedule. That's not a crime, in fact it's actually really common. It's just that most of the time, delays like this don't completely destroy the value of the product.
There's also the problem that everything happened in China, which would make prosecution quite difficult.
In the future, the best thing to do for a large chip order would be to
license a design. Rather then dealing with Avalon/BFL/whoever the thing to do would be to pay whatever company
BTCX and they'd write a letter to their upstream provider authorizing group Y to oder up to X chips
direct from the fab. They'd pay the the design company and the upstream provider separately, and that would remove one point of failure from the whole process - in fact, the most likely source of failure as they'd be a very new startup liable to have all sorts of problems (as we can clearly see from BFL and Avalon)
