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From: die@hydra.UUCP (Dave Emery)
Newsgroups: net.ham-radio
Subject: Theft is Theft
Message-ID: <128@hydra.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 15-Sep-85 01:10:43 EDT
Article-I.D.: hydra.128
Posted: Sun Sep 15 01:10:43 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Sep-85 03:19:07 EDT
Distribution: net
Organization: Charles River Data Systems, Framingham MA
Lines: 91


	Theft is Theft.

	I started poking around the terrestrial and then the celestial
microwave spectrum in the mid 70's.   Amoung the things I found were the very
powerful (someone told me 100+ watts) MDS transmissions that carried 
HBO and of course the satcom cable feeds (which were much harder to receive)
and various terrestrial feeds that all carried the HBO signal.  I thought
long and hard about whether I had any right to watch movies from these HBO
signals and decided that in doing so I was obtaining a service that
I would otherwise have to pay for, and which someone paid to provide,
transmit and so forth.  This seemed to me to be theft pure and simple.

	I could see no difference in kind or substance
between paying for a copy of these signals from a downconverter or cable
so I could watch them on my tv for whatever amusement I could get from
the old and usually second rate movies they run, and hooking up a
kluge of microwave hardware to my tv and pointing a horn out the
window at Boston's Prudential building.  Granted I had provided the
receiving hardware, but it seemed very clear to me that I was receiving
exactly the benefit I would get if I subscribed to the service.  It
seemed a very stretched interpretation of 605 or
for that matter simple morality to argue that I had some inalienable
right to use the service for free just because I provided the receiver
and they beamed it at me. I was never able to rationalize
my right to pirate a service that someone had gone to considerable expense
to provide, so I never watched it.

	I feel that this same principle applies to using any rf
service for which there is a usual fee, particularly if this fee is intended
to cover the costs of providing the service and transmitting it, not just to
cover the cost of the receiving equipment.  It seems to me that a somewhat
stretched analogy can be made with the widely accepted view
that it is not morally appropriate (or legal either) to copy and/or use
licensed software in violation of it's license terms simply because it 
is easy, technically trivial, and often conveniant to do so.  It seems
to me that the same kind of moral scruples that lead us to frown on those
who make pirate copies of our software ought to be raised when we point
our tvro's at satellites that carry programming that someone paid to
provide as a service they charge for.

	In short, whether or not it is legal to intercept signals from one rf
source or another (which was a subject of considerable disagreement on the net)
obtaining a service without paying for it by intercepting such signals
is theft. 

	The only contrary perspective I can think of is that radiation of
information into space owned and occupied by others is somehow equivalent
to putting it completely into the public domain (or at least ceding
all rights to it to those whose space it traverses) and that the provider
of a service therefore cedes all rights to collect for providing his
service when he transmits it by radio.  This viewpoint would give anyone
the right to do absolutely anything they want with any
information that alters the E or M field in any space they have control
over.  As a practical matter this would eliminate unencrypted radio as a
medium for transmitting any form of proprietary or confidential or
private information, and elevate cryptography and cryptology to
the status of crucial arts.

	One has to wonder whether this view is justified as one tries
to balence the rights of individuals to make sense of photons impinging
on them with the social purpose of providing communications and services that
would be otherwise impractical or impractically expensive to provide.

	In any case as a hacker, I still occasionally poke around and
try demodulating random signals I find (as a strictly technical challenge
and recreation) but I remain careful not to allow myself to use my
knowlage and skill to obtain services that I am not paying for.  My 
recreation (very occasional these days now I have a wife and child
to soak up my time) is technically quasi-legal since I am only looking
at data and other signals not covered by 2115 (did my posting on this 
get out?) but is probably a dying sport as broader laws and encryption
steadily encroach.

	I would not recomend the kind of technical swl'ing I became addicted
to in my youth to a child of the modern age, aside from the fact that
we are gradually waking up to the need to secure communications and starting to
install encryption and non-rf links at a rapid rate, the temptation
to cheat and use one's skills to obtain services grows more difficult
to resist as rf based services proliferate.

	It is probably better to regard listening to anything but what
one can pick up on an ordinary unmodified tv or AM/FM radio as forbidden
fruit, the same way we carefully avoid using a UNIX (tm) utility
on an unlicensed machine.


          David I. Emery    Charles River Data Systems   617-626-1102
          983 Concord St., Framingham, MA 01701.
	  uucp: decvax!frog!die


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