Right. Its using a service without paying for it which is theft if proven that it was done intentionally. Not sure how copyright was brought into this conversation.
No, it can't be theft unless the service provider lost the channel being "stolen" to the "thief" which makes no sense. Things quickly become silly when we insist on using the wrong concept where it doesn't apply.
Charges like disrupting business operations or unauthorized access I can see, but theft? nah.
Right, but nobody takes anything, the sticking point is the copyrighted content.
Unless someone tries claim you are stealing electric current, this claim of theft is absurd - first you must attach a device to the cable, then spend your time watching said device (presuming it has a screen). Until that happens, it belies belief that you have "taken" anything. After that point, one must assume somehow this is content enriching your life somehow (dubious), or that you are recording and reselling content (which would be obvious fraud, at the copyright level).
Before then, the fact is that another entity is blasting all content continuously on all their lines. That's not theft.
I'm not arguing that people should be intentionally jacking into other people's wires, or saying cable should be free for everyone, just that the legal definition of theft here is absurd. That you can then be prosecuted for something you have not done by no fault of your own except malpratice of the people involved in originally laying the lines, is ridiculous and a sure sign if cronyism and protectionism, not one of a healthy judicial system.
You could make that argument about almost any criminal statute where the victim is a corporation of some sort. Another way to describe it is "private company gets a mechanism to deter people from taking the value they create without paying for it."
Not all the value going over those lines is created by the cable company.
In fact, very little of it is, and it can only exist on the vast majority of its path with taxpayer support.
So what? They still have fixed and variable costs for delivering their product. You don’t get to take it for free just because some other entity creates the content they deliver.
I don’t see what that has to do with what the previous commenter said about the cable companies not creating “all the value” going over their lines.
In any case, in the United States, theft of service is generally treated as a criminal matter. I don’t see why this should be treated any differently, or how it would be fair to single cable companies out for exclusion from protection for having their service taken for free. Inn Keepers, other utility companies, and many other businesses enjoy the same or similar protections for their services.
"Theft" doesn't just mean "physically taking something away from someone else, who now no longer has it". As much as you might like it to mean that, that's not what the law says.
On top of that, it takes equipment, hardware, personnel, infrastructure, power to deliver cable. The OP literally has no idea what they are talking about, and could use the same logic for electricity theft.
Electricity theft does extract a resource from the grid (electricity provider needs to supply the energy you're using on the other end). Similarly, phreaking uses phone lines which is a finite resource too (and phone company would rather keep those available for paying customers).
Cable on the other hand runs all channels to your household in the first place. By removing the filter, you aren't creating any additional load on the cable network or using any additional resources for free.
Just because the harm caused by an individual action is tiny doesn't necessarily mean that thing should be legal.
For example I have a small amount of engine oil that needs disposal. I could dump it in the drainage ditch in front of my house and probably the only measurable harm it might cause would be to weeds that are growing in the ditch. By time it got to where oil could harm anything valuable it would be so diluted that it would not cause any detectable harm.
Yet doing so is illegal. It needs to be illegal because if a large number of people did it there would be measurable harm even though the harm from any one of the individuals would not be measurable.
With any kind of theft of services you need to look at not just the direct harm an individual might cause to the service provider (which may be immeasurably small) but also the harm to the service provider and to the people who are paying for the service if theft of services were widespread.
To give an extreme example if I am the only customer in my town who is actually paying for service with everyone else committing theft of services to get that service the service provider is likely to either withdraw from the market or raise rates significantly, either of which harms me.
Of course it would never actually get that extreme, but if even a few percent of people are doing it the service provider will probably start spending money on technological solutions to stop that. And the costs of those technological solutions will likely be pushed onto subscribers. Those solutions may also require installing more equipment at the user end to use the service (e.g., set top boxes) that can reduce the user's privacy.
And I don't think anyone is arguing that there shouldn't be some sort of legal action against cable stealing. My initial comment is really focused on the fact that it involves jail time.
To the oil ditch example, I certainly could see something like "it's $1000 and cleanup costs". The only way I could see jail time being justified is if you routinely decided to go around spraying the neighborhood with motor oil.
But for cable, there doesn't seem like there's ever a case where an individual could warrant jail time. Fine + cable bill for the free months of cable seems like more than enough for most people and for the "serial offender" it seems like lifetime subscription would be more than enough to avoid future problems (court mandated cable would be an interesting punishment :D)
One might argue that when viewed, there is current draw, and that additional channels typically means more viewing.
But I was thinking of overall service theft, and did not think of the filter. That case is different.
This makes me think, though. I lived through this time, and adding the filter makes zero logistic sense. EG, why have anyone, who isn't paying, even connected?
Then I remembered something.
I lived in a house, where there was a shared box for 2 units. Someone had pried open the box, and removed the filters. As a result, the cable guy disconnected the wire at the pole.
This resulted in something different. Instead of a cutoff, most channels came through, just very fuzzy. And as a kid, I lived in a rural area, and we owned an antenna booster/amp, which had made signals poorer than this, crystal clear.
It seemed that leaving an uncapped end inside a box on the pole, with loads of signal, bled enough for a usable signal to get through.
So this is probably why a filter was placed. And of course, to prevent the long wire from picking up local over the air stuff too.
Many years ago the house I was living in had cable (foxtel, Australia) connected, but the residents who had paid for it had moved out and were no longer paying for it, therefore it sat as an unused plug in the wall for a good couple of years.
I got one of those old "TV cards", so you could hook up an antenna and have TV on your computer (yeah, this was before "internet" was better than TV for moving picture entertainment) and had heard about software that could decode foxtel signal.
After a lot of futzing about, and failed attempts, it started working well enough to be watchable - although most of the content was shit, it was foxtel after all.
My point being - the signal is sent through the cable either way. Whether there's a device at the end of it or not. Equipment, hardware, personnel, power was provided by me to get it working. The previous residents paid for the connection of the cable itself. The data is all sent down the pipe whether or not someone was watching it at the far end, just due to the nature of cable at the time.
I get your electricity analogy though, but I really don't know if it applies to the data being sent down the cable. I doubt it cost "faceless them" any extra as my understanding was that the cable was a shared signal by the street (or some other small-ish communal size).
A lot of older sci-fi books, eg Heinlein, had hacker types discovering some highly profitable thing, but being uninterested except it was fun to figure out. This was often to the mystification of "normal" people, who would plead for them to work the idea into profit.
Often they were tricked into making the process profitable, by being told how impossible it was.
I responded in more ontopic detail in another comment.
Would you please inform me, if you can, as to which books are you thinking of? I have read a few Heinlein novels but would like to know if I'm missing a classic in your eyes.
I can't think of specific ones, I think I've read everything he wrote.
But I just recall small exchanges, im many of his works, where Long or another character, would notice some scientist archetype come up with an idea, yet not care one wit about exploiting it.
It was all about the puzzle of discovery, and Long/etc was often amused.
I genuinely wonder what lead them to choose a word that, by definition, is so far removed from the concept being described?
If we accept how this law wants to redefine Theft, then trespassing, squatting, illegal parking, and many other violations should now be called theft too since they involve using a resource in an unauthorized way and are actually depriving others from using the resource (which does not happen with cable modems). Spamming comments should also be called theft too since they're using server resource in an unauthorized way.
But I have to submit: If discussed within the context of Theft of services in ORS 164.125, then I supposed the misuse of Theft can be excused. That said, I really don't think we as a society should humor or follow how some lobbyist or politician decide to misuses words.
