one of the things that bothers me the most about the way it currently operates is that if you pickpocket an NPC and get away, the pick-pocketed items are still marked as "Stolen" and other NPC's will take them away if they find them during a search.
You can always sell the stolen items (to another NPC or even the same one), kill them and loot their corpse to get the items back. That removes the stolen tag.
