We really need to look long and hard at what we allow jail time for. Jail time in service of big media corporations seems just insane.
They want to be able to install a cable all the way to someone’s house, and then have the state prosecute them if they dare touch it.
One could argue this is a major purpose of the state. When you can't deputize the state to resolve disputes, you get gang violence (see the drugs trade for more examples than you can count)
Charges like disrupting business operations or unauthorized access I can see, but theft? nah.
>ORS 164.125
>Theft of services
>(2) ... “Communication service” includes, but is not limited to, use of telephone, computer and cable television systems.
If we accept how this law wants to redefine Theft, then trespassing, squatting, illegal parking, and many other violations should now be called theft too since they involve using a resource in an unauthorized way and are actually depriving others from using the resource (which does not happen with cable modems). Spamming comments should also be called theft too since they're using server resource in an unauthorized way.
But I have to submit: If discussed within the context of Theft of services in ORS 164.125, then I supposed the misuse of Theft can be excused. That said, I really don't think we as a society should humor or follow how some lobbyist or politician decide to misuses words.
Pennsylvania: https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/CT/HTM/18/00.039.02...
Texas: https://codes.findlaw.com/tx/penal-code/penal-sect-31-04/
New York: https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/165.15
In any case, in the United States, theft of service is generally treated as a criminal matter. I don’t see why this should be treated any differently, or how it would be fair to single cable companies out for exclusion from protection for having their service taken for free. Inn Keepers, other utility companies, and many other businesses enjoy the same or similar protections for their services.
Unless someone tries claim you are stealing electric current, this claim of theft is absurd - first you must attach a device to the cable, then spend your time watching said device (presuming it has a screen). Until that happens, it belies belief that you have "taken" anything. After that point, one must assume somehow this is content enriching your life somehow (dubious), or that you are recording and reselling content (which would be obvious fraud, at the copyright level).
Before then, the fact is that another entity is blasting all content continuously on all their lines. That's not theft.
I'm not arguing that people should be intentionally jacking into other people's wires, or saying cable should be free for everyone, just that the legal definition of theft here is absurd. That you can then be prosecuted for something you have not done by no fault of your own except malpratice of the people involved in originally laying the lines, is ridiculous and a sure sign if cronyism and protectionism, not one of a healthy judicial system.
Survey says...XXX
Texas Penal Code Section 31.04 - Theft of Service
https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._penal_code_section_31...
Electricity theft does extract a resource from the grid (electricity provider needs to supply the energy you're using on the other end). Similarly, phreaking uses phone lines which is a finite resource too (and phone company would rather keep those available for paying customers).
Cable on the other hand runs all channels to your household in the first place. By removing the filter, you aren't creating any additional load on the cable network or using any additional resources for free.
But I was thinking of overall service theft, and did not think of the filter. That case is different.
This makes me think, though. I lived through this time, and adding the filter makes zero logistic sense. EG, why have anyone, who isn't paying, even connected?
Then I remembered something.
I lived in a house, where there was a shared box for 2 units. Someone had pried open the box, and removed the filters. As a result, the cable guy disconnected the wire at the pole.
This resulted in something different. Instead of a cutoff, most channels came through, just very fuzzy. And as a kid, I lived in a rural area, and we owned an antenna booster/amp, which had made signals poorer than this, crystal clear.
It seemed that leaving an uncapped end inside a box on the pole, with loads of signal, bled enough for a usable signal to get through.
So this is probably why a filter was placed. And of course, to prevent the long wire from picking up local over the air stuff too.
Ah well.
For example I have a small amount of engine oil that needs disposal. I could dump it in the drainage ditch in front of my house and probably the only measurable harm it might cause would be to weeds that are growing in the ditch. By time it got to where oil could harm anything valuable it would be so diluted that it would not cause any detectable harm.
Yet doing so is illegal. It needs to be illegal because if a large number of people did it there would be measurable harm even though the harm from any one of the individuals would not be measurable.
With any kind of theft of services you need to look at not just the direct harm an individual might cause to the service provider (which may be immeasurably small) but also the harm to the service provider and to the people who are paying for the service if theft of services were widespread.
To give an extreme example if I am the only customer in my town who is actually paying for service with everyone else committing theft of services to get that service the service provider is likely to either withdraw from the market or raise rates significantly, either of which harms me.
Of course it would never actually get that extreme, but if even a few percent of people are doing it the service provider will probably start spending money on technological solutions to stop that. And the costs of those technological solutions will likely be pushed onto subscribers. Those solutions may also require installing more equipment at the user end to use the service (e.g., set top boxes) that can reduce the user's privacy.
To the oil ditch example, I certainly could see something like "it's $1000 and cleanup costs". The only way I could see jail time being justified is if you routinely decided to go around spraying the neighborhood with motor oil.
But for cable, there doesn't seem like there's ever a case where an individual could warrant jail time. Fine + cable bill for the free months of cable seems like more than enough for most people and for the "serial offender" it seems like lifetime subscription would be more than enough to avoid future problems (court mandated cable would be an interesting punishment :D)
I got one of those old "TV cards", so you could hook up an antenna and have TV on your computer (yeah, this was before "internet" was better than TV for moving picture entertainment) and had heard about software that could decode foxtel signal.
After a lot of futzing about, and failed attempts, it started working well enough to be watchable - although most of the content was shit, it was foxtel after all.
My point being - the signal is sent through the cable either way. Whether there's a device at the end of it or not. Equipment, hardware, personnel, power was provided by me to get it working. The previous residents paid for the connection of the cable itself. The data is all sent down the pipe whether or not someone was watching it at the far end, just due to the nature of cable at the time.
I get your electricity analogy though, but I really don't know if it applies to the data being sent down the cable. I doubt it cost "faceless them" any extra as my understanding was that the cable was a shared signal by the street (or some other small-ish communal size).
Once I got it working, I mostly lost interest :)
A lot of older sci-fi books, eg Heinlein, had hacker types discovering some highly profitable thing, but being uninterested except it was fun to figure out. This was often to the mystification of "normal" people, who would plead for them to work the idea into profit.
Often they were tricked into making the process profitable, by being told how impossible it was.
I responded in more ontopic detail in another comment.
But I just recall small exchanges, im many of his works, where Long or another character, would notice some scientist archetype come up with an idea, yet not care one wit about exploiting it.
It was all about the puzzle of discovery, and Long/etc was often amused.
“Grand theft auto” is “taking without consent” in most of the U.K., although in Scotland it’s “taking and driving away”
It’s a sad sign of American cultural hegemony that GTA wasn’t called TADA.
Either way the amount of power abstracted from a cable signal is infinitesimal.
If no unlawful deprivation of property has taken place then no theft has taken place. Why is this concept so hard to understand?
There is no theft. In the digital world there's merely copying, but in this case it was just tuning into an existing signal with a wire.
Theft of property would require that you broke into HBO's office and stole the master tapes, for example.
As to the telecom aspect, it can go either way. In Canada, it is considered theft to use a telecommunications service without the rights to do so. Under USA federal criminal law, I believe it is just referred to as unauthorized reception.
Property theft and intellectual rights theft are two very different things. If I steal your car, you are now out a car and the use of a car. If I steal a copy of your artwork, you still have that artwork and can still sell copies of that artwork. I only start impacting your bottom line if I start selling copies.
To the extent you are impacted by a copyright violation, you can be made whole with a market rate payment for the copies created and a penalty. That's what civil law is for.
Wage theft has a much bigger negative impact on people's lives yet it's basically never criminally prosecuted. So why should copyright theft ever be criminally prosecuted?
> Also note that cable theft (e.g., the physical tampering element) can damage emergency communication lines and can create dangerous electrical problems.
Fair point, though I can't see why we'd punish that more harshly than we'd punish unauthorized digging (which is typically just civil to replace damaged lines.)
No, it isn't. The hint is right there in the name. Copying does not deprive people of their property. That's why they came up with the word Infringement to use instead of Theft, because they are fundamentally different things.
It worries me that there are people now who think that information is like property and that it can be owned.
Huh? The term "Intellectual Property" is a metaphor, not literal. There is zero intrinsic moral imperative against copying; copyright is a policy decision to encourage creation under a capitalist system. Other systems for encouraging creation have existed in the past (and exist concurrently with copyright).
If copyright were a property right, then "fair use" would be legalized theft.
Copyrights are transferable intangible assets created by the legal instruments of the capitalist system. If you were to buy the copyright to the Metallica catalog, you can license that catalog for a return on your investment. It would be an asset of your estate like any other paper investment.
[Edit: Also... La propriété, c'est le vol!]