I don't think you know the whole story. He gave HP the option to own all his work on the Apple I, and he was aware the entire time of the conflict of interest with his employer, and vocal about it.
The rule of law has a lot of ambiguities and intent and context certainly matter.
If someone repeatedly says “you can have this” and you say “no” and then say “no wait I want it now that it is valuable” you probably don’t have an open and shut case regardless of what a contract says.
I’m not super familiar with Woz’s story so if that’s not what happened, my point was more about the ambiguities of the law and flexibility of its application.
He was both aware and vocal about it and tried to do something about it, but HP was not interested, which gave him freedom to pursue it independently with Jobs.