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Mr. Luddite

On 10/4/2014 1:05 AM, wrote:
On Fri, 3 Oct 2014 21:01:43 -0700 (PDT), wrote:

On Friday, October 3, 2014 11:07:03 PM UTC-4, wrote:
On Fri, 03 Oct 2014 19:21:44 -0400, F*O*A*D wrote:

...integrity:

Marriott fined $600,000 for jamming guests' Wi-Fi

inShare13

Friday - 10/3/2014, 7:20pm ET

SCOTT MAYEROWITZ

AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) -- Marriott International will pay a $600,000 fine for

jamming conference attendees' own Wi-Fi networks at its Gaylord Opryland

Resort and Convention Center, forcing them to pay hefty prices to use

the hotel's own connection.

It is interesting that every Marriott we have stayed in had free WiFi

for the guests. Must be a Gaylord thing.

This is where the consumers can vote with their wallet.

If a few companies pulled their conventions, Marriott would fold.

I do agree that it is illegal to jam radio traffic tho,.

(the same reason your techy neighbor would get in trouble for jamming

drone signals). The whole area of cell phone jammers is working it;s

way through the courts as we speak.

It will eventually get down to property rights vs the right to use the

government's radio waves.

A friend in California, back in the old days, was among a group who built antennas that could receive a movie service that was broadcast, for pay, to customers. They were, in effect, stealing the movie service using that old rule that if it was broadcast over the air, you could receive it. The company providing the service sued, one of the guys that had built his own antenna that had deep pockets went to court, and he lost. All the folks with the renegade antennas had to take them down.

They had that in DC in the 70s on Channel 50. I built the bootleg box
but it never really worked that well. All they were doing at that time
was wiping out a sync pulse and burying it in the sound track. The box
I built was with a scrap tuner out of an old TV. The best ones used a
digital tuner from a Sony or something. It was a $100 part wholesale
when a TV was $150
The movies were crap anyway.

Generally they can only enforce a law against building and selling the
equipment. Simple reception of unscrambled signal cases have gone
either way and I am not sure any ever made it to an appellate court.

I do know the lobbyists for the satellite companies got special laws
protecting themselves but I am not sure any of them were ever tested
either. They dealt with it by just making their encryption so hard to
beat that it was not worth it. One of my neighbors was playing that
game with Direct TV for years. It finally got to the point that he had
to log onto a Chinese web site in the middle of a show to get the new
key and the lag time was several minutes before they had generated it.
I think they were changing keys 10-15 times a day or something.

I don;t know a lot about it because it always sounded like more work
than it was worth.

Yeah, simply receiving a broadcast signal is not illegal. In fact the
FCC says you can't ban people from doing that.

But if the broadcast data is scrambled and you build or buy your own
"box" to de-scramble the content, then you are defrauding or stealing
from the service provider. That's illegal.