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May 29, 2007

To avoid jail, pay for your coffee

This article caught my eye on 'borrowing' a Wi-Fi signal. My first thought is that this crackdown of the law seems a little extreme. How many of us have found an unencrypted Wi-Fi signal to quickly jump online to go about our business? In this guy's situation, he made it a regular routine.

$400 fine for using Wi-Fi without buying a cup of joe
Posted by ZDNet Government @ May 24, 2007 @ 6:51 AM

Steal some Wi-Fi, go to jail. In the sleepy town of Sparta, MI, Sam Peterson, perhaps the cheapest man in the world, sat in his car outside the Union Street coffee shop using its network - without the decency to buy a lousy cup of joe, reports News.com.

Peterson would log on around noon everyday, arousing the suspicions of local Police Chief Andrew Milanowski. Peterson, probably not knowing his actions were criminal, freely admitted what he was doing.

“I knew that the Union Street had Wi-Fi. I just went down and checked my e-mail and didn’t see a problem with that,” Peterson said.

In fact, Milanowski was unaware the practice known as “piggybacking” was illegal, so his did a bit of legal research. “I had a feeling a law was being broken,” said Milanowski. He found Michigan’s “Fraudulent access to computers, computer systems, and computer networks” law, a felony punishable by five years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

“This is the first time that we’ve actually charged it,” Kent County Assistant Prosecutor Lynn Hopkins said, adding that “we’d been hoping to dodge this bullet for a while.”

Milannowski wrote Peterson out a ticket but he won’t do time. Peterson, however, will have to pay a $400 fine, do 40 hours of community service and enroll in the county’s diversion program. Perhaps it would be fitting punishment to make him spend that $400 on coffee at the Union Street and do his community washing dishes.

Posted by Erik Small at May 29, 2007 08:28 AM digg this add to del.icio.us add to My Web Furl this page

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