Wifi

[acadiANNA]

1. Honesty is the best policy.
2. If I can’t afford it, I don’t get it.
3. Pay to Ceasar what is Ceasar’s and pay to God what is God’s. This
   would be paying Ceasar.
4. If you cannot be trusted in small matters, how can you be trusted in
   large matters?
5. Is your brother being an enabler? Is he contributing to your “theft”?
   What about “Thou shalt not steal”?
6. Follow the example of Christ.
7. Many people have asked me to lie for them, I won’t do that either.
8. I’m not better than anyone else, I just try to make right choices.
   I would have a clear conscience and sleep better at night having my own
   connections. My opinion.

 

[DexUK]

I don’t think you understand the morality of breech of contract. When you enter into a contract with someone you are pledging to abide by the terms of that contract. When you knowingly cheat on the terms of that contract then you are guilty of lying. The only reason that the wifi case looks appealing is that you don’t see how it costs the ISP any more when you let someone use your service. But that’s just because you are not familiar with the economics of being an ISP. If everyone started sharing their wifi with 4 or 5 neighbors then the ISP would either go out of business or quadruple their rates.

The OP’s brother may well have a usage limit on his service. In that case, the usage limit will be reached quicker, the service curtailed or significantly degraded and the ISP will be no worse off.

The situation is no different from the OP physically stepping over the dividing line between the two properties with his laptop in hand. 1 inch one way he’s fine, 1 inch the other, he’s not. That’s what makes your proposition a nonsense in respect of morals. This is a purely contractual matter and nothing to do with theft since the product being ‘stolen’ is actually being shared out and there’s a finite amount of it and the person doing the sharing is aware of this and permits it. Nobody is getting something to which they are not entitled.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

Does the same apply to letting someone watch tv at your house? Or letting them ride in your car? Or letting someone make a call from your phone? Why or why not?

There is no contract specifying that people can’t watch TV at your house, and certainly nothing about riding in your car, or letting someone make a call from your phone. Internet access is different because you do agree to abide by the ISP’s restrictions when you sign up. You don’t “own” the Internet access, you merely have a license to limited access to the Internet. When you exceed those limitations you are in breech of that contract. It is as if you contracted to have a roofer re-roof your house, but after agreeing to a price you somehow tricked him into re-roofing your neighbor’s house as well. The difference in that case is that it is hard to trick someone like that, but it is much easier to trick the ISP into providing wider service than they intended. But the easy of tricking the supplier should have no bearing on the morality of the situation. If extracting additional services from the roofer is immoral then extracting additional services from the ISP is also immoral.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

The OP’s brother may well have a usage limit on his service. In that case, the usage limit will be reached quicker, the service curtailed or significantly degraded and the ISP will be no worse off.

You are just speculating. if such is the case it would reduce the effect on the ISP. But what is much more likely is that most people do not max out their usage limit, and the ISP’s pricing structure takes that into account. You can be sure that is everyone always used every last megabyte to which they were entitled, the ISP would have to upgrade their equipment sooner.

The situation is no different from the OP physically stepping over the dividing line between the two properties with his laptop in hand. 1 inch one way he’s fine, 1 inch the other, he’s not.

Just because you have found an outlandish middle-ground case, that does not diminish the moral implications of everyday regular abuse of the privilege from the privacy of your home.

This is a purely contractual matter and nothing to do with theft since the product being ‘stolen’ is actually being shared out and there’s a finite amount of it and the person doing the sharing is aware of this and permits it. Nobody is getting something to which they are not entitled.

Why do you associate the word “merely” with “contractual” as if contracts by their very nature have no moral implications? If you think about it you will find many examples of contracts that have serious moral implications. Is their no moral aspect to your giving your word and then doing exactly what you promised not to do? That sounds like lying to me.

As for their being a finite amount of “product”, that description is not accurate. You don’t buy Internet access merely in terms of megabytes. You pay for the availability of the service, even when you don’t use it and even though you don’t reach your usage limit. The ISP has to pay technicians to keep the equipment maintained and available even when you are not using it. The ISP would definitely suffer loss if there was widespread Internet sharing by end customers. The only reason they are not hurt now is that not that many people do it because they realize it is wrong. The argument that it is a big company and they would not miss a few megabytes of extra traffic is no better than saying it’s OK to shoplift a few grapes from the produce section of a large grocery chain. Sure, they won’t notice it if only a few people do it. But if everyone did it then they would certainly notice.

 

[DexUK]

You are just speculating. if such is the case it would reduce the effect on the ISP. But what is much more likely is that most people do not max out their usage limit, and the ISP’s pricing structure takes that into account. You can be sure that is everyone always used every last megabyte to which they were entitled, the ISP would have to upgrade their equipment sooner.

Just because you have found an outlandish middle-ground case, that does not diminish the moral implications of everyday regular abuse of the privilege from the privacy of your home.
Why do you associate the word “merely” with “contractual” as if contracts by their very nature have no moral implications? If you think about it you will find many examples of contracts that have serious moral implications. Is their no moral aspect to your giving your word and then doing exactly what you promised not to do? That sounds like lying to me.

As for their being a finite amount of “product”, that description is not accurate. You don’t buy Internet access merely in terms of megabytes. You pay for the availability of the service, even when you don’t use it and even though you don’t reach your usage limit. The ISP has to pay technicians to keep the equipment maintained and available even when you are not using it. The ISP would definitely suffer loss if there was widespread Internet sharing by end customers. The only reason they are not hurt now is that not that many people do it because they realize it is wrong. The argument that it is a big company and they would not miss a few megabytes of extra traffic is no better than saying it’s OK to shoplift a few grapes from the produce section of a large grocery chain. Sure, they won’t notice it if only a few people do it. But if everyone did it then they would certainly notice.

The OP and his brother are neighbours. They are family. As family they own (or rent, I don’t know) these two properties. To all intents and purposes the properties are held in common, as is the internet service (the OP said he would make a certain amount of recompense to his brother).

I would agree with you in cases where a neighbour piggy-backs without permission on an unsecured wifi connection for which they contribute nothing. But this case is simply not as you portray it.

This is not theft. Nothing is being stolen. The OP’s brother is paying for a service which he can use up to a predetermined limit, without question (even to the extent that that limit might be infinite). The OP is compensating his brother by, presumably, paying for a share of that service. Given that they live physically next door to each other, it’s not even remotely a stretch of the imagination to suggest that they have an extended ‘home’ to which they both have common access.

To accuse the OP of theft in these circumstances is unjust.

This is only a contractual issue at worst. It’s no different from a contract that says I may not park an RV on my parking spot but I go ahead and do it anyway. It’s a civil issue, not a matter of sin any more than exceeding the speed limit on an open empty desert road by 1mph is not a sin.

I can be strict about many issues which ARE tantamount to theft (i.e. music and video piracy) but this isn’t close and to pretend it is will feed other people’s scrupulosity issues.

This isn’t theft. Two people are clubbing together to pay for an internet service between them. They each get half of it and the usage limits are, in effect, twice as onerous for each of them. Perspective is everything in this.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

The OP and his brother are neighbours. They are family. As family they own (or rent, I don’t know) these two properties. To all intents and purposes the properties are held in common, as is the internet service (the OP said he would make a certain amount of recompense to his brother).

Why should he compensate his brother? His brother is not losing anything by letting him use the wifi. The only one that is losing is the ISP by having to provide for more services than they planned.

I would agree with you in cases where a neighbour piggy-backs without permission on an unsecured wifi connection for which they contribute nothing. But this case is simply not as you portray it.

The bother’s permission is irrelevant. He is not the one with the authority to grant permission.

Let me give you an example that is a little more concrete and one I have witnessed personally. We used to live in a rural area where trash pickup was optional. People could sign up with the waste management company or not. If you signed up you paid a monthly fee for any “reasonable” amount of household trash you put out on trash day. But one neighbor would always seem to have more than the normal amount of trash at the side of the road. One day I saw a relative of his who lives nearby drive up and drop off his trash at his relative’s house. Apparently they had made an agreement to “share” the one relative’s trash service. The trash company never complained because they did not know. They didn’t place strict limits on the amount of trash you could throw out because that would create a great inconvenience for people who occasionally did have a lot of trash of their own. So they trusted the customers to only put out their own trash.

Now perhaps you have more sympathy for trash workers than for “cold heartless ISPs”. But the fact is the trash haulers had to empty their truck more often, they incurred greater fees from the landfill, and generally were being taken advantage of. I call that immoral, and I think you would too. It is stealing a service.

Maybe the reason you don’t feel the same way toward ISPs is that you don’t believe they incur added cost for incremental service increases, but they do. And if it is immoral to steal from trash haulers it is immoral to steal from ISPs.

This is not theft. Nothing is being stolen.

Services are being stolen.

The OP’s brother is paying for a service which he can use up to a predetermined limit

I already addressed this issue in a previous posting. The predetermined limit is only authorized if it comes about through usage that abides by the terms of the contract. It is easy to imagine one person buying broadband service and then reselling that service to 20 or 30 neighbors (with wi-fi repeaters) on a somewhat limited bandwidth basis, and making a lot of money in the process - money that rightfully belongs to the ISP. Do you call that moral too? Or is moral use confined to sharing that does not involve the transfer of money?

The OP is compensating his brother by, presumably, paying for a share of that service.

He is compensating the wrong party. The one he should be compensating is the ISP.

Given that they live physically next door to each other, it’s not even remotely a stretch of the imagination to suggest that they have an extended ‘home’ to which they both have common access.

It is up to the ISP to decide if they want to treat the extended family as a single unit or not. They are the ones providing the service.

This is only a contractual issue at worst. It’s no different from a contract that says I may not park an RV on my parking spot but I go ahead and do it anyway. It’s a civil issue, not a matter of sin any more than exceeding the speed limit on an open empty desert road by 1mph is not a sin
This isn’t theft. Two people are clubbing together to pay for an internet service between them. They each get half of it and the usage limits are, in effect, twice as onerous for each of them. Perspective is everything in this.

You are right that perspective is important. A small injustice is not as serious as a large injustice. But it is the size of the injustice that makes it less serious, not the fact that it is a contract. You give examples of abuses that are small and inconsequential, and I agree - they are. But if that is the basis on which you are going to mitigate the OPs choice then say so. If the OP doesn’t use the Internet very much then the added burden on the ISP is going to be small - and perhaps even if the ISP knew about it they would choose to do nothing about it. As I said before, it is like shoplifting a few grapes from the supermarket. It is not a serious matter. But it stills sits at one end of a continuum that has large scale theft of services for economic gain at the other end.

 

[Booter]

Well looks like i started a fun thread here. Probably just going to get my own router but the trend of the posts seems to beg the question, what kind of sharing is acceptable? No one would argue its wrong to share a book with someone, but technically you are denying the author the wage of two sales. There is a difference between legitimate sharing to save money, and trying to find loopholes or beat the system. The question is what is acceptable to share without being considered a thief or denying someone their money?

 

[Timothysis]

Well looks like i started a fun thread here.

Probably just going to get my own router but the trend of the posts seems to beg the question, what kind of sharing is acceptable? No one would argue its wrong to share a book with someone, but technically you are denying the author the wage of two sales. There is a difference between legitimate sharing to save money, and trying to find loopholes or beat the system. The question is what is acceptable to share without being considered a thief or denying someone their money?

You ask some excellent questions. I have to agree with DexUK in that there is nothing being stolen that isn’t being paid for. Some tend to find right and wrong in everything but I happen to think that there are many situations that are morally neutral (such as borrowing a book, cd, movie, etc.) and this is one of them. It is a legal and honest connection; there is no reason why your brother cannot let you use it if he wishes.

 

[LeafByNiggle]

… but I happen to think that there are many situations that are morally neutral (such as borrowing a book, cd, movie, etc.) and this is one of them. It is a legal and honest connection; there is no reason why your brother cannot let you use it if he wishes.

Perhaps in this situation because the amount is small. But I hope you will agree that if the amount of “sharing” is increased by, say, sharing your connection with 20 or 30 neighbors, and perhaps getting a fee from them for the service, that does become morally problematic.

 

[Timothysis]

Perhaps in this situation because the amount is small. But I hope you will agree that if the amount of “sharing” is increased by, say, sharing your connection with 20 or 30 neighbors, and perhaps getting a fee from them for the service, that does become morally problematic.

But that is a very different from the original post. My statement applies to what was related by the OP.