There is a whole generation of young people that don’t understand the meaning of private property, I see it in my own kids. The recording industry cracked down on college kids downloading copyrighted music and movies with kids here in ND being fined in the 3500-4500 range. They didn’t understand downloading music and video was the same as stealing private property when the artist has not released the copyrights for the work.
This guy was using internet being paid for by someone else without their permission. That is stealing pure and simple. I don’t know what is so hard to understand about that.
Not true. The wireless access point (WAP) granted the permission. To hook up to a WAP your computer sends out a request, this request is either denied via MAC filtering or other types of access controls, or it it granted. In this case, permission was granted via the WAP and he logged on.
In both cases, neither party who is "stolen" from actually loses anything measurable. In the former case, you could argue that the artist loses potential revenue they'd have otherwise received from purchase of their music, but that assumes that any of the downloaders would have actually paid for it.
In this case, the guy might be misusing their parking area (taking up a space that could go to a paying customer), but the store is certainly not losing anything through his internet use unless they pay by the MB (highly unlikely).
Starbucks offers free Internet to attract customers. It does get him close to their store, where he's likely to be more tempted to buy their coffee than if he wasn't there. It's a pretty fuzzy area I think.
If I hire a the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders to hang out and dance in front to attract attention to my burger joint I can't complain about people coming to look and not buy my burgers.
My girlfriend was outside washing her car and the neighbor had his radio on loud. I caught her dancing to the music.
Sure am going to miss her since I turned her in to the cops.
I was with you on that whole copyrighted music and all that. Then one day I was standing at the local nursery looking at some potted flowers for sale. They had notice on the little sign in the pot that this plant was proprietary and propogation without permission was illegal etc.
That day I wandered off bewildered and a couple days later I decided that this had gone far enough. Intellectual property insanity had hit roman candle proportions.
Man should not be allowed to go so far as to patent plants and such. Its just nuts.
Now I don’t care so much about the whole topic as I used to. Copy what you want. Maybe its stealing but if this crowd had been around in the middle ages all our hymns would be owned by someone and we’d have to pay licensing fees for the King James scriptures.
Its madness I tell you madness.
You said: This guy was using internet being paid for by someone else without their permission. That is stealing pure and simple. I don’t know what is so hard to understand about that.
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This is little different than stealing music. It seems more analogous to standing outside the shop and reading by the coffee shop’s lights...