The recent caution of a man in Redditch by West Mercia Police for "dishonestly obtaining electronic communications services with intent to avoid payment" raises some interesting questions.
According to the BBC News Web Site: "He attracted attention from neighbours in the early morning, as he had put up cardboard around his car windows but the light from his computer could be seen through the back window." This was clearly suspicious behaviour, but there are plenty of open wireless access points where their owners are quite happy for people to "borrow" their bandwidth since (I assume) they would hope to do likewise elsewhere themselves.
Indeed, this very notion of "scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" is one of the key underpinning elements of the early and non-commercial Internet, where connected organisations and individuals utilised each others equipment on a quid quo pro basis.
What concerns me and which raises an important issue is how do you know that a particular wireless hotspot is open for free access? In a residential area, it is not plausible to put up signs everywhere stating that Number 16's is free, but Number 17 will sue you...!!
Furthermore, a lot of existing Wifi-enabled equipment will enumerate and try to connect to any access point. Does that constitute an offence?
Commercial hotspots simply redirect all web accesses to a login screen until payment has been accepted. Other hotspots that are intended for private use only and that are properly configured will make it very difficult for anyone else to use (and certainly trying to would clearly be abusive behaviour).
The problem is poorly configured wireless access points. You cannot be sure whether you have the owner's permission to use their service.
One interesting idea is whether future wireless access points should have a simple web server that displays a "usage notice" and runs a "well-known" web service stating whether or not the access point is free for use. If this was enshrined in a standard then Wifi devices could assess whether they were connecting to a hotspot that they could freely use. This would probably also invoke a greater degree of protection from the Computer Misuse Act in the United Kingdom and similar acts in other jurisdictions.
Indeed, perhaps the web-service concept could be extended to other Internet services such as email. If Internet standards were established so that the "usage policy" service became well-known, then connecting devices could query whether their access or use of a particular service was acceptable or not. Failure to comply would then leave the owner of the device wide open to prosecution (although catching them might be difficult!)
At least the honest would know whether they were abusing a free resource or not...