On Sat, 16 Feb 2008 04:39:27 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@nospam.pacbell.net (Bill Z.) wrote in :
The problem is the Tragedy of the Commons, where the service gets abused by folks doing things like illicit file sharing, which more than soaks up any excess bandwidth, and risks bringing law enforcement down on the local establishment.
The "Tragedy of the Commons" seems to be a non-issue in this case, partly due to the clientel. Since the business is providing its customers with an Internet service - connectivity for buying coffee, the business might be covered by the ISP exception to the DMCA: .
Chances are they are simply 'sharing' their end-user ISP account with clientele, and their terms of service probably forbid this in a business setting; how do you suppose they could successfully defend or afford to defend against criminal or civil prosecution?
Michael
Since many coffee shops do this, there terms of service most likely do not forbid it, which is why business accounts cost more.
Also, they might have a solid defense against what their customers do based on laws that protect ISPs. If you want to claim otherwise, show one case of a business providing free wifi for its customers ever being successfully prosecuted for copyright infringement. Given that they allegedly sued one person for "illegal downloads" using a service that didn't run on his/her hardware/OS, the lack of any cases should be a pretty good indication as to whether it is a non issue.
This is a pretty interesting debate, but does anybody have any real facts, as opposed to the "chances are", "probably", "most likely" and "they might" type of guesswork?
That's why I asked about any cases in which a business providing free wifi ever got in legal trouble due to their customers' usage of the service. Naively reading it, the DMCA seems to protect them, but then you have to know all the "case law", etc. If there have never been any court cases, I'd sort of like to know why - it is not because the music industry isn't going after people.
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