Thanks to Michigan's Three Strikes law, a "reformed criminal" who got in trouble a few times back in the 70's or 80's could probably face a life term if he's busted now for freeloading. That's taxpayer dollars at work folks!

just another reason why the USA has more people behind bars per capita than any other country in the world!

Bottomline: If the moron who set up the wifi network can't READ the instructions on any router expressly telling them to enable security features, then they are willing sharing the connection for public access.

Why didn't they charge the guy with illegally sniffing coffee odours too? What's with the liberal lax laws? ;)

...if you want to download pirate torrent data, the best thing to do is hook up a wireless router and just feign ignorance. "It must have been the neighbor kid" when your ISP sends threatening e-mail letters. "How the heck do you secure these blasted confounded things, tarnation!"

I think wireless is the best way to indulge in copyright piracy.

"as a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 and up to three years in jail"

How does that square with the common definition that a felony is a crime carrying a sentence greater than one year?

Ref. for instance the current FBI porn sting. This is how the legal mind works. Make it illegal, it therefore doesn't happen, therefore no more inconvenience.

IMHO it is just common sense to distinguish between an intention and an accident. But there is more going on.

Of course the Internet Service Providers would like to see that everybody locks up their wireless network, because they fear the competition from a free Internet based entirely on our wifi devices. Free as in Bier and Speech. Think about a mesh where network traffic is hopping from neighbour to neighbour to its final destination, without an ISP between, with all the bandwidth avaiable through mutliple parallel wireless instances. Not really a big surprise that some parts of the government are already in the ISPs' pocket (or is it vice versa?!).

Why didn't the lawyer argue that anyone with the capability to log and identify the MAC address and e-mails of the guy that was prosecuted for using the mobile network, must also therefore know how to secure their wireless network -

therefore, given that they didn't do that and would have known it meant anyone could use it, they can't complain later if anyone did use it.

Yea, i remember that maryland dude. He's called l33tz0r and he has mad rep in the 'hacking' community!

These laws are insanity. Yes, I think that there should be protections for people who secure their networks, but open networks are an invitation for people to log on-- an open house, so to speak. It should be up to me, as a broadcaster, to limit access if I don't want anyone receiving my signals, not up to everyone else to not log into an open network. 
Take the fellow out in front of the coffee house (I can't believe he lost that case, WTF was that jury thinking?)-- do you think that he even knew that it was a crime? Most of the coffee houses here have unsecured networks and I wouldn't think twice about just popping on their network if I needed to check some email. I can't wait until police start setting up open networks just to ensnare those malicious surfers and email-checkers and make our streets safe once again.