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Karel Jansens's Avatar
Posts: 3,220 | Thanked: 326 times | Joined on Oct 2005 @ "Almost there!" (Monte Christo, Count of)
#18
Originally Posted by DJames1 View Post
Actually trespassing on private property might be a better analogy (obviously it's not equivalent to "breaking and entering" if there's nothing to break). If you needed to step onto someone's private property for a trivial purpose such as retrieving a ball, or just stopping to tie your shoelace, that might technically be trespassing, but obviously not a major concern unless it was repeated abuse. Perhaps unprotected WiFi access could be considered in a similar way. If you access a unprotected WiFi link momentarily to check your email without knowing exactly where it's coming from, that's a trivial trespass that isn't doing any harm to anyone. If you did it all day every day using your neighbour's WiFi instead of getting your own internet access, that might be worth getting annoyed about. If you were using it download massive amounts of warez and porn, that would certainly be criminal trespass.
I'd rather compare it to the right of passage. If you don't want people to trample over your grounds, put up a fence. OTOH, fair use is presumed (and sanctioned! at least where I live): You can't go hiking through a farmer's wheat crops days before the harvest.

I'd like to see this kind of common sense applied to WiFi: If you don't have an unlimited access plan, close up your network; otherwise, let people walk through it. But they, in their turn, aren't allowed to use someone else's free WiFi cloud to P2P 50 terabytes of German Scheisse-pr0n.
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