Wireless Internet freeloading might become a crime
Found on The Inquirer on Saturday, 22 March 2008
If a law proposed last week in Maryland gets passed, intentionally using a neighbour's wireless Internet connection without permission will be a crime.
He cited the story of some man in Michigan who was prosecuted for parking outside a coffee shop and freeriding on its wireless network to check his email.
The man was charged with a felony and faced a fine of up to $10,000 and up to five years in prison.
As an alternative, the man chose a diversion program, a $400 fine, spending 40 hours in community service and six months probation.
Wait, someone fails hard at setting up a basic encryption for his wireless network and someone else gets sued if his laptop picks up the signal and connects? Only a braindead lawyer can come up with such an idea. Soon someone will broadcast unencrypted pay-tv and sue everybody who watches it. This illustrates a nice problem: instead of becoming smarter, slap others with lawsuits. It's not just about hopping on an open network to check mail: if companies would adopt the same strategy, they'd end up with tons of problems. Instead of harmless surfing, spies from other companies would loot their systems. And I doubt trying to curb the leaked data with a lawsuit would work.