yg17 said:
I've got HBO, Cinemax and Starz, on top of all of the digital cable channels at my house. Lets say my friend who happens to live next door doesn't have cable or satellite. Just regular over-the-air TV. Now, lets say I let him come over to my house all the time to watch a good movie on HBO or watch some crappy Cinemax porn. Like he spends at least 10 hours a week at my place watching TV with me since he doesn't have any of these channels. He's getting something free that he would normally have to pay for. But it would be absurd to say he's stealing, right?
Lets say we run out of booze and we both hop into his car to make a run to the liquor store. He's got a CD playing in his car that I don't own. You wouldn't say I'm stealing now, would you? I mean, I'm not paying for the CD, I don't legally own it, but I'm listening to it. Is that stealing? Could I be prosecuted? Nope.
Now, let's say my friend next door has dial up, but he wants to download a huge file. I let him download it on my 3 meg broadband connection, using my computer, and burn it to a CD to take back home. He's using a broadband connection which he did not pay for. But it would be silly to say he's stealing.
Get my point? There are so many things in this world that technically, we should pay for, but don't, and it's all legal.
No, but if you jack into the cable line and run it into your house, then that is stealing. If you rip that CD and store it on a media of your possession (Hard drive, compact disc, etc) then that is stealing. If you run a ethernet cable from your house to their house, then it would be stealing. Of course, with these examples, the primary seeker of prosecution would be your Cable TV provider, the RIAA, and your ISP since generally in these examples, the end user would be willing letting you steal off of him.
The difference in WIFI is that you are stealing from the ISP as you would be if you the broadband connection via a hard line, but the end user may not even be aware of the theft and didn't give his blessing to it, so to speak. This makes WIFI a strange situation. All the above medias listed in the above examples that you gave give permission to the end user to use the service for private usage. You can broadcast your Cable TV to anybody you want in the privacy of your own home. You can listen to your CD with anybody you want with certain restrictions. Off hand, you can't reproduce it (or at least reproduce it for resale or giving it away) and you can't use it in say movies without permission. I'm not sure what limitations are placed on music for public playing. And internet is considered for residential usage only and I'd say that an ISP would not consider "residential" if you're starting your own neighborhood network since you're becoming your own little ISP.
Now the thing about WIFI is that by leaving a network open, you're allowing theft to take place. Is it stupidity on the part of the end user? Yes, very much so. You have to be a complete moron to leave your WIFI network unprotected for anybody driving by with a laptop to take advantage of; or incompetent. And this world is filled with both kinds.
Now there are all kinds of thefts that do take place that ARE THEFTS and ARE ILLEGAL but are of such a minor and inconsequential manner that it has been regarded as just the way things are. Making a copy of your favorite CD or tape back in the day, and giving it to your friend. Illegal? Yes. But it is considered such an inconsequential and hard to prosecute act that it was basically regarded as just a fact of life. This changed with peer-to-peer sharing, but that is a different beast. Hell, using your residential phone as a business phone is a form of theft since you are not using your phone service for its licensed purpose in order to escape paying the higher, business rate. Taking two papers form the newspaper machine when you only paid for one is theft. And expanding on already existing laws and TOS, the ISPs are going to declare that sharing your internet via a WIFI network with your neighbors is going to be theft against them. Personally, I think that if you want to willingly share your internet with your neighbors wirelessly is another of the many thefts that happen everyday but are inconsequential and go unpunished and I really don't care if it goes unpunished as long as it isn't rampant enough to affect the entire market or my experiences as a consumer.
Now taking somebody's WIFI connection without their permission because radio waves do not have respect for physical boundaries annoys me because it has a very real potential of directly affecting a person in a very real and significant manner. Now for those who will use an open network to check their email or something insignificant; if I discovered you using my network for that, I would be extremely pissed, but on the whole, it will probably become another form of theft that is considered so minor and harmless that it isn't worth going after. Now, there are those who will use a network as their sole source of internet connection and those are outright thieves since they will be leaching a significant amount of bandwidth, especially over time, regardless of what they do. Not only that, they will be using my IP address as a mask for anything they visit so that it appears that I am the one visiting those sites which is a form of fraud; especially if used explicitly for that reason and purpose. Now I should be protecting my network from allowing people on, but some people don't realize that they should be doing this or are too incompetent to do so or maybe their WIFI network's hardware or software is too inferior or difficult to allow the user to secure their network properly. People should lock their doors at all time but failure to do so does not make breaking and entry any less of a crime.
