The headline makes him out to be cleverer than he actually is. He put up a webpage with one-page "white papers" about internet installations for hotels and resorts. He then registered a residential account with Comcast under his name, and hooked it up to provide cheap internet for the hotel. He then did this for 34 other hotels, until a Comcast technician doing maintenance noticed this ad hoc setup.
Despite the residential agreement being very clear that you are not allowed to resell the service, he is pleading non-guilty and that he was "simply being singled out because he was successful."
This isn't a story about a big corporation beating up on an entrepreneur or someone trying to share. This is about someone who was taking Comcast's services, using it commercially, and charging (presumably) a large mark-up. It also points out the importance of reading carefully through agreements when you start a business!
Comcast has a right to cancel his accounts, to pursue litigation in order to find the addresses of all of his other illegal installations and, yes, to use the threat of monetary damages. You don't want a bad precedent forming.
Unlike DSL cable modems are registered by mac address, and not by physical location. So you can get an account at one address, but really use it at another.
For starters, you can always use someone else's MAC address, as long as they aren't on the same neighborhood loop. Since you can easily sniff all the MACs on your loop, you can just trade lists with someone elsewhere. Most ISPs have only one global MAC database, so locality doesn't matter.
If that wasn't enough, for all the US ISPs I know of, you don't even have to have a valid subscriber MAC. You just configure your hacked modem to fetch a high-end config file (instead of "walledgarden.cm"), and set your own non-poisoned DNS. Many ISPs in Europe change their config filenames constantly to at least make you try.
Despite the residential agreement being very clear that you are not allowed to resell the service, he is pleading non-guilty and that he was "simply being singled out because he was successful."
This isn't a story about a big corporation beating up on an entrepreneur or someone trying to share. This is about someone who was taking Comcast's services, using it commercially, and charging (presumably) a large mark-up. It also points out the importance of reading carefully through agreements when you start a business!
Comcast has a right to cancel his accounts, to pursue litigation in order to find the addresses of all of his other illegal installations and, yes, to use the threat of monetary damages. You don't want a bad precedent forming.