Re: Hacking into private files, my credit card purchases, personal correspondence or anything that is mine is trespassing and criminal.

[Ron DuFresne <dufresne () winternet com>]

Vincent, I think you lost track in your reply, he was not talking about
braondband cable access to the internet, he was talking about cable TV
services being stolen in this case, and the teft of the 'service'.

Thanks,

Ron DuFresne

On Mon, 11 Oct 2004, Vincent Archer wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 08, 2004 at 11:41:49AM -0700, Jesse Valentin wrote:
> > How about using a digital de-scrambler for cable service? You?re getting something you?re not paying for? isn?t 
> > that stealing? True, its not a vital service, but isn?t this still plain ?ol stealing?
>
> It's not stealing. The cable company has lost nothing. Every single bit
> it had, it still has. The only part you might remotely have stolen is
> the amount of electrical power required to bring the bits to your home.
>
> That's how, in ages now long gone, an acquaintance of mine got charged.
> It was the early days of X25 networking, you had plenty of computers
> unsecured connected to access points (login: root, password: root),
> so they created a BBS on one such. The BBS took off, until the company
> noticed. Unfortunately, they couldn't demonstrate any loss; the computer
> was still there, no data was damaged, the callers used charged calls (i.e.
> the company was not billed for X25 usage, the BBS callers were).
>
> In the end, the original BBS creators were charged with "theft of energy",
> i.e. raising the electrical consumption of the computer equipment due to
> extra activity. It didn't stick, but that was the only theft that occured,
> and there was no legislation on hacking to fall back on.
>
> It's the same with the MPAA and the RIAA screaming about "thieves". They've
> stopped doing so, it's trivial to show that nothing was stolen, and they
> are not facing lost property, they're facing lost customers.
>
> Descrambling is counterfeiting and copyright violation, but not thievery.
>
> (IANAL, of course)

-- 
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OK, so you're a Ph.D.  Just don't touch anything.

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